🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2BACBDD0.6300@ics.uci.edu> honig@ics.uci.edu (David A. Honig) writes:
>I'm considering getting a notebook clone so I can type in the outdoors.
>I want to be able to compile there as well.  But this would be a satellite
>relationship to my real accounts on suns.  So it would be great if I could
>use gcc on a PC.  Just gimme DOS, a compiler, a variant of emacs,
>probably a deskview multitasker, and a liter of water...

Instead of running DOS, you might want to consider getting Unix.
Notebook PCs are getting powerful enough now that they can run Unix
fairly well.  You'll probably want to get at least a 386SL/25, or a
486SL-based machine if you can afford it.  At least 6MB of RAM, with
8MB preferred.  At least a 120MB hard drive, with 200MB or more if you
can afford it.  You can probably forget about X11 on the laptop unless
you get one with at least 12MB of RAM and at least a 250MB hard drive.
If you get Unix, you'll be able to use all the development tools
you're used to using under SunOS, and as an added bonus you won't have
to deal with that nasty Windoze(tm) thing.

There are two free Unixes available for the PC: Linux and 386BSD.
Linux was written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with help from lots
of others.  Most of the system utilities are from the GNU
distributions, and the OS itself is copylefted; both of which make it
the Politically Correct(tm) OS for the gnu.* groups.  386BSD is a port
of the BSD Net-2 tape to the 386.  The original port was done by
William and Lynne Jolitz, and there is a sizable user community that
has done work beyond that.  It's not copylefted, but instead is
covered by the standard UCB/CSRG copyright.  You can find out more
about Linux in comp.os.linux, and more about 386BSD in
comp.os.386bsd.*.

There are also various commercial releases of SVR4 for the 386, as
well as SCO.  However, I'm sure that rms will jump all over me for
mentioning them here, so I won't.  You probably don't want these on a
laptop, anyway; they're all pretty bloated and take up quite a bit of
disk space and RAM.  Linux claims to fit into 40MB of disk space and
run in 4MB of RAM, which would make it ideal for a typical laptop.

-- 
Marc Unangst, N8VRH         | "Of course, in order to understand this you
mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us   |  have to remember that the nucleus of the atom
                            |  is squishy."
                            |    -W. Scheider, from a Physics lecture