personal system

[Richard L. Goerwitz]

Question about home systems:

I've been a very satisfied Xenix user for some time now.  Never had
much trouble getting software up under it.  What with some of the socket
emulation software that's recently been posted, this even goes for the
very BSDish code which I often want to move homeward.

It turns out now that my sister and brother-in-law want to do likewise.
They'll be getting a 25Mhz 386-based VGA system with 4 megabytes and
no numeric coprocessor.  They'll almost surely not be using things
like TCP/IP, and probably not even X.  They will, however, require a
development system.  They can probably get by with groff and PD man
systems in place of a text processing system.

The question is this:  What flavor of UNIX should they be thinking
about for 1, possibly 2, users?  They are not hackers, and so sim-
plicity of installation and maintenance will be a plus.  Great secur-
ity features will not be much of a concern.  They may want a news
feed at some point.  Certainly they don't want to pay for a lot of
extras they'll never use.

Any comments would be much appreciated.

-Richard (goer at sohist.uchicago.edu)