Xenix Serial Boards

[NeXT]

Seems to be an unusual spike in popularity for Xenix right now....

I'd rather not build another PC just to run Xenix but I have a somewhat dumpy 286 Toshiba luggable with a pair of ISA slots and wondered if I could drop-in a multi-port serial board and be able to then carry around a portable multi-user Unix environment rather than a whole PC, monitor etc. What was Xenix's support for serial boards and how good was the vendor support from companies like BOCA or Digi?

 

[Caluser2000]

When I gave it a shot a couple of decades ago on my Zenith 286LP Plus I found the hdd support was extremely lacking.on Xenix.

 

[bear]

xenix supports a fair number of multiport boards. best bet is to read the hardware configuration guide for the version of xenix you plan to install.

 

[whartung]

That used to be our goto demo box back in the day, a Compaq lunchbox clone with the red plasmas display. Boy was it tight in there! But that said, I think most any common multi-port board may well just work. On our main machine we had this 16 port board, ASIC powered thing, it was very nice, but provided it's own drivers.

Oh, also we were running SCO Unix, not Xenix at this time.

 

[NeXT]

For the record the luggable is a Toshiba T3200 (not an SX!) with 1mb ram (but the 3mb addon board would be nice) and 40mb Fujitsu drive (lists as MFM). It can fit one full-length 16-bit ISA card and a single 8-bit ISA card (so multiport serial and an NE2000 compatible card) and with one line in the EGA comaptible plasma screen that fades in and out I've been unable for the life of me figure out any other use for this slug other than Xenix.

 

[Caluser2000]

Sounds like a match made in Heaven

 

[Svenska]

It's unfortunate that Xenix-286 does not support networking, the NE2000 won't be usable. On the other hand, I was very impressed how smoothly Xenix handled two floppy drives, a serial kermit transaction and games on the local console simultaneously without choking on my 286/12.