*BSD News Article 20451


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!menudo.uh.edu!uuneo!sugar!bonkers!peter
From: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: A few words about BSDI
Organization: Taronga Park BBS
References: <jmonroyCCtzDv.2vE@netcom.com> <26b1qp$t2f@sdl.warren.mentorg.com>
Message-ID: <CCvuD2.4DC@taronga.com>
Keywords: BSDI review
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 1993 13:19:35 GMT
Lines: 22

In article <26b1qp$t2f@sdl.warren.mentorg.com>,
Tom Limoncelli <tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM> wrote:
>They said that their original intention was to do one article comparing
>the Unixes but after having such a total SHOCK of discovering how truly
>horrid the PC architecture is, they decided to do Part 1 on their
>installation nightmare and Part 2 as the real comparison.

I think their installation nightmares were worse than they could have been.
In all fairness to the PC architecture, I've only had similar nightmares when
buying all-in-one boxes specced by some random loser assembly house. If you
go buy all the bits yourself (AMI BIOS, Micronics motherboard, Adaptec 1542,
Maxtor Panther, generic VGA with no fancy dot clock setup, etcetera) you can
generally expect to have things work right straight out of the box. It's a
damn shame, of course. Perhaps NT and Chicago will start pushing the envelope
a bit and all the marginal hardware choices that people can get away with in
DOS will fall by the wayside.

Of course you won't have very good X. I'm still getting up to speed on video
adaptors... anyone have suggestions? Particularly ones that go well with
XFree86 and 386BSD?

Like everyone else, I can't even BEGIN to parse Monroy's article.