🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <32631FD4.391B@worldnet.att.net> Karen Chiu <chiu-scharf@worldnet.att.net> writes:

   The number of people giving their kids a machine running Unix or a
   derivative, can probably be counted on less than one hand.

With the increasing number of multi-PC households running Linux servers, I
doubt that this is true anymore.  I certainly wouldn't advocate making Unix
your *only* home OS, but one machine with a proxy server on it makes it
possible for everyone in the family to surf the Net at the same time..


   Anyone running Unix is certainly intelligent enough to figure out DMAs, IRQs,
   and I/O addresses.

Again, not necessarily.  Even experienced Unix system administrators can have
a lot of trouble figuring out what's happening when a new card is installed on
an old system.  Besides, the original comments a few posts back had to do with
PnP in general.  It's not called ``Plug and Pray'' for nothing.

   You can go into the device manager and remove devices you're not using, then
   freeze the configuration so PnP doesn't put them back next time you power up.
   I had to do this with my sound card with SCSI.

Which device manager?  I'm not sure Win3.1 supports this sort of thing.  I'm
quite sure it doesn't have anything in it that will let me remove the second
IDE controller, for example.

   Windows 3.11 will also network fine with NT & 95. But it is true, as you
   stated, 3.1 will not. The upgrade to 3.11 is pretty inexpensive.

I didn't think Win3.11 was still supported, but you may be right.  It has
other problems, though; I had enormous amounts of trouble installing the
Chameleon TCP/IP stack on a 3.11 machine.  Everything's fine as long as you
stay in the M$ world, but as soon as you try to add Mac and Unix to the mix
you're in trouble.

   Lest anyone think that this thread has diverged from its original purpose,
   I don't believe it has. The number of multi-computer families is rising
   as often parents using one machine for business or work, don't want the
   kids messing with it. Yet they want to share expensive peripherals like
   printers & scanners. A lot of houses have sufficient numbers of twisted
   pairs in the walls to install 10BASET networking without much trouble
   (a hub isn't even needed if it's only two machines).

I agree completely with this.  My house has 3 PC's and a MacII, and we're not
all that unusual.  As soon as you get up over two machines, it's worthwhile to
dedicate one (typically your oldest) as a server; Linux and BSD are by far
the cheapest and best-performing OS's to use in this case, since they give
acceptable performance even on machines too slow and small to even consider
running Win95 on.  This is equally true in a work or community network
situation, by the way.  I know of at least one municipal freenet built
entirely out of cast-off 386's donated by computer stores, running BSD (I
forget whether it's the Free- or Net- variety; probably FreeBSD).
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