8.1 on CD ROM

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Fri, 19 Apr 91 10:57 EDT
    From: lawton@AIVAX.RADC.AF.MIL (James Lawton)

    With the great news of Genera 8.1 finally being actually released, and
    with all the talk of the distribution being available on CD ROM, I would
    very much like to know just who can use the CD ROM distrubution?  What
    kind of hardware configuration must one have?  How is the software read
    off the CD?

    For example, we have a cluster of 36xx machines, a Sun 3/260 with a
    UX1200S in it, and a Macintosh with a CD ROM drive (Well, the CD ROM
    drive isn't actually here yet, but it will be soon).  Note that there is
    no Ivory in the Mac, and there is no CD ROM drive on the Sun.  All of
    this equipment is connected via ethernet.

    So, can a configuration like this make use of the CD ROM distribution?
    If so, how?

That doesn't sound like a workable configuration.  I expect that Genera
accesses the CD-ROM drive as if it were a tape drive, and I don't think
the Macintosh implements servers for any of the remote tape access
protocols that Genera knows (Symbolics RTAPE and Unix /etc/rmt).

The CD-ROM drive is just a SCSI device, so if you can buy a SCSI
interface for the Sun you could then hook the CD-ROM drive to it when
you need it.  Newer Sun models have SCSI interfaces built in, but
Sun-3's don't.

                                                barmar