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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!yeshua.marcam.com!MathWorks.Com!panix!not-for-mail From: tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: BSD on 68040 Mac Date: 25 May 1994 01:07:32 -0400 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and Unix, NYC Lines: 54 Message-ID: <2rumek$ab9@panix2.panix.com> References: <edmundsz-170594222124@slip122.ucs.orst.edu> <CqB5I1.7FC@demon.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix2.panix.com In article <CqB5I1.7FC@demon.co.uk>, Marc Nicholas <marc@rednet.demon.co.uk> wrote: >In article <michaelv.769285838@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu> Michael L. >VanLoon, michaelv@iastate.edu writes: >>>I have a Quadra 650. netBSD will not work on 040 machines. I've heard >>>that they are working on an 040 version. > >Or maybe try MachTen from Tenon (sales@tenon.com).... > >This is one *hot* BSD UNIX and works on *all* Macs including Oh, come on, you're making me laugh. MachTen is a wonderful, inventive, clever product. I like it a lot. I use it every day. But "hot"? Or further still, "*hot*"? You've got to be kidding me. The only on-disk filesystem it supports is the MacOS filesystem, translated through layers of cruft to look like a unix filesystem. But you still can't make a directory named ":" last I checked, and disk access, compared to native 4.3 FS access on the same disks on real workstations, is slow as molasses. Which is like most things under MachTen compared to the way they are under a real, native UNIX, since MachTen has to run under MacOS; unlike A/UX, MachTen has no MacOS emulator process that runs in userland; the MachTen world is peon to the MacOS world. Kinda a shame. And a bunch of the utilities are still lock-stock-and-barrel 4.3BSD, with *no* changes. Somewhat aggrivating, to say the least. Add to that the absurdity that they don't give you what you'd need to rebuild a kernel (why?!) and that although they support raw writes to floppies, they _don't_ let you use a real filesystem on a floppy or elsewhere, and you've got some real stupid design and policy decisions coming to the fore. And still, compared with plain, ordinary UNIX (Or NextStep Mach) on equivalent 020, 030, or 040 hardware, *it's slow as molasses*. And despite all this, I think it's a great product, and Tenon have never been anything but helpful to me. But they sure seem to have made some silly decisions along their development path; here's hoping they change them. I for one would prefer a genuine native BSD implementation on the Mac and PowerMac. But MachTen is good enough for most of my purposes, and I'm sure it's far preferable to most prospective Tenon customers. -- Thor Lancelot Simon tls@panix.COM But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp! You towel! You plate!" and so on. --Sigmund Freud