In article <1992Aug13.213754.11916@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>,
mal11@po.CWRU.Edu (Matthew A. Lewis) writes:
|> has anyone had any experience with this MACH  BSD version on UNIX???

I'm using Mach 2.6 on my 386/40 clone as a standalone system.  It's
got a 120Mb IDE drive and 8M 80ns memory.  The system is loaded with
X11R5 and LaTeX as well.

The pros are that it works.  The system seems fairly stable and with
the exception of a flakey floppy connector which will crashes the system
when it is accessed it runs most of the software I need and have tried
to compile.  LaTeX is not terribly slower than (maybe 30-40% slower)
than a SPARC but seems faster than a sun 3/280.

The cons are that without 8M you can't really use X11.  I've trimmed the
kernel down as much as possible but it still takes up 2.4M of memory and
when I only had 4M it would thrash almost constantly when moving between
windows.  This version of Mach doesn't support (or doesn't seem to support)
shared libraries which means that the binaries for most X11 clients are
at least 100M and most (like xterm or xv) are 400M-700M.  This also means
that it you have alot of binaries you will not have alot of free disk space
and vice versa.  At 120Mb I've only got about 15Mb left for my work.

And, of course, Mach isn't as easy to get as Linux (in terms of what you
have to sign, etc).

I'd love to use Linux since it seems to have everything I need (like shared
libraries), but this machine is up and running right now and with working 
on my dissertation a priority, if it ain't broke I ain't gonna fix it (yet).

-- 
        Ken Hughes              |   "Which button do I press to turn
   (hughes@sol.csee.usf.edu)    |     it off?"  "Try the red one,  
FT-Ph D candidate, PT-ex-sysadm |     allright?"  "Which red button?"
University of South Florida     |          ....  _Heathers_