Commodore UNIX, some questions

[psxphill]

Interesting; I didn't know that there were so many 68k ports of SVR4 around. By 1992 Unix usage had started to tilt towards RISC platforms (SPARC and MIPS), and Motorola's 68040 did not exactly draw a crowd (although Apollo Computer/NeXT used the 68040 in a number of models).

NCR sold 68040 based machines too. Around 1992 was when x86 unix started to take off.

[rabindranath72]

[A/UX] I can't say I've ever used it. But it it's SVR4 compatible, it might actually offer better support for building "current" software on it than NEXTSTEP wound up.

A/UX was a mix of SVR2.2 (with bits of 3 and 4) and BSD versions 4.2 and 4.3. It was also SVID and POSIX compliant, and from version 2 it also supported TCP/IP.
To have a chance of compiling more modern software, you need at least A/UX 2.0.1 (which runs well on the smaller 030 machines.) Sadly, while A/UX 2.0 can be easily found, its update to 2.0.1 is next to impossible to find.
The alternative is A/UX 3.1.1 (the latest release) which is easy to find, and which works well on 040 machines, but it is somewhat sluggish on the 030s. I have it installed on both my Macintosh SE/30 and Quadra 650.
The nice thing about A/UX is that it provided an interface layer with the underlying Macintosh ROMs, and it effectively ran Mac OS (System 6 under A/UX 2 and System 7 under A/UX 3) as a process, so you could run Macintosh applications in the same environment. In fact, A/UX presents itself with the standard Finder, and you see that it's really UNIX only when you explore the menus and find the Command Shell