19990304: McIDAS on Windows NT running Interix

>From: "Jennie L. Moody" <address@hidden>
>Organization: UVa
>Keywords: 199903041847.LAA11519 McIDAS NT

Jennie,

>We have an opportunity to put McIDAS onto some
>new machines we have in a lab adjacent to mine here at UVA.
>The machines are Dell Pentium II processors 400MHz, 128MB RAM,
>10GM Hard Drives,

Sounds good.

>running Windows NT 4.0.

Oops.

>If I recall, the
>Wisconsin booth was running and NT machine but I didnt really 
>get what the deal was, it was running Interix (sic?)  rather 
>than LINUX or SolarisX86?

The machine was running NT and Interix (http://www.interix.com).  The
Interix package provides the facilities needed to run Unix programs on
NT.  We will be testing out this environment in the near future to see
if it could be of use to our community.  This is one of the reasons that
the machine I am taking home will have NT as one of its multiple boots.

>I guess I was hoping that I could get 
>a bit more information.  I know in the last User's Comm meeting, 
>the support for LINUX and SolarisX was added, they became part 
>of the supported platforms.  But if we want to put either of these on 
>an NT, do we need something else first (I guess all I retained
>was there was something different about the way the NT box was
>operating with respect to these UNIX variant operating systems?)  

Solaris x86, Linux and NT are all operating systems.  If you want the
machine to run Solaris x86 and NT, then the machine must support
dual boot.  If you were running in NT and want to switch to Solaris x86,
you would have to reboot the machine and select x86 from the boot
manager (which also has to be installed).

>Maybe this is discussed on the web page somewhere,

No, it isn't.

>but I did 
>a quick look and couldn't find it.  We are having a meeting here 
>*tomorrow* to discuss what if any PC-Unix variant we might load 
>onto a couple of these machines and I want to make sure the 
>decision will allow us to run McIDAS and getting data from
>our Sun Solaris system running as an ADDE server.  

Right now, you would have to load either RedHat 5.2 Linux or Sun
Solaris x86.  Again, if the machine is to be shared, then it would have
to be booted into the OS that was desired.  At some point in the
future, it _may_ be possible to load Interix in the NT environment and
then be able to run McIDAS in client mode.  The last I heard, SSEC had
not even tried to see if you could run the ADDE remote server in the
NT/Interix environment.

>Thanks.

If you are trying to decide on Solaris x86 and Linux, I would have to
recommend Solaris x86 for a couple of reasons:

o security
o your local knowledge/experience with Solaris

I can tell you, however, that getting the machine I'll be taking home
work was _by far_ the hardest in Solaris x86.  I still can not get
PPP to work in x86 (Solaris support for internal modems is not good).
The easiest to get working was NT, but Linux was not far behind (modulo
getting the screen resolution I wanted).

Tom