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Is A/UX 3.0 usable on SE/30?

megabyte

Well-known member
I want to install A/UX 3.0 onto my SE/30. Will it work with reasonable speed or I will get a slideshow?

 

beachycove

Well-known member
It is slow by comparison with a Quadra, but it is not an absolute disaster, from what I remember from several years ago when I tried it. Years ago some Italian ran a web server (Apache) from one, which was referenced in the old Mac server directory that is out there, but alas, it is no longer alive. Its performance was certainly adequate.

My reason for moving on from the SE/30 had to do with its ram limitations, as I had probably 32mb in the SE/30 and wanted a little more for A/UX. It went onto a Quadra.

 

megabyte

Well-known member
Will native 68k Mac software run with proper speed under A/UX?

 
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beachycove

Well-known member
68k software will run much faster under System 6 or 7.0.1 or 7.1 than under A/UX 3, obviously, but if you have enough RAM, the software will probably run better under A/UX than it would under the pressure of the bloat in something like System 7.5.5. I tried period products from Claris on an SE/30 running A/UX 3, and, as I recall, they worked just fine.

More positively, I would say that in some ways, while an SE/30 is rather slow for A/UX, it is also a good machine for running it, because you aren't going to want to be using your collection of fancy-pants Nubus cards in the thing, and these almost never work under A/UX. To put this another way, A/UX limits a Mac II or a Quadra in a way that it can't limit the SE/30....

(By the way, SE/30 Ethernet drivers are built into A/UX, so you will be good on that score, and A/UX overcomes the 8MB RAM limitation of the SE/30's ROMs. At the same time, A/UX is not compatible with accelerator cards, so far as I know, so that would be a limitation.) 

 

megabyte

Well-known member
to be using your collection of fancy-pants Nubus cards in the thing, and these almost never work under A/UX.
SE/30 PDS expansion card are not compatible with A/UX too. So only only not expanded SE/30 will be compatible with this OS.

 

cb88

Well-known member
My reason for moving on from the SE/30 had to do with its ram limitations, as I had probably 32mb in the SE/30 and wanted a little more for A/UX. It went onto a Quadra.
Ram.... limitations???? Anything specific because the SE/30 supports 128Mb ram and with a flashed rom you can also disable the long ram check.

 
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VMSZealot

Well-known member
I found that A/UX 3 was fine on my SE/30 - I was even able to get on the net (via an Asante Ethernet card).  Performance was fine (64MB in my SE/30).  But there are two provisos that you must be aware of.  Firstly, sound doesn't work in most applications - so you'll have to get used to computing in silence.  Secondly, if the A/UX partition gets corrupted, even slightly, then you'll have the very devil of a job to get it back again.  After the third time, I gave up.  My hard disk is getting reformatted and I'll stick with System 6.0.8 and MacOS 7.6.1 (yes, I have a 32bit clean ROM).

I'll telnet into my Unix server for the Unix goodness, and use MacX to give me X Windows.  I'm investigating using MacMinix for some local Unix goodness - but I can't work out how to mount the Mac file system in Minix (and it's not going to be much use if I can't conveniently get files onto, or off of, it).

 
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