Scott:
Thanks for your note. I'm replying by way of the EROS lists because folks there will want to see the answers as well, and the questions you ask don't seem personal in nature.
> I have read most of the technical literature at the EROS
> site and still am left with some basic questions that
> I hope you could ake the time to answer. Is EROS, in
> a basic sence, a file/print server OS like unix or Novell?
EROS is a general purpose operating system. It could certainly be used as a file/print server, but it is not limited to that application.
The range of devices that EROS can reasonably run on goes from handheld devices with MMUs (as all of the WinCE devices have) to midrange servers. On the high end, the major impediment is that the current implementation is not multiprocessor ready. Also, there are a variety of pieces that need to be completed, most notably the network stack.
> Where can I get a copy of it to experiment with?
Go to the main web page at www.eros-os.org. Look at the very top 'new' item. Instructions for download can be found on the release notes page.
> How is it connected to and utilized?
At the moment, there is no networking support in place. This and the user environment are the next pieces to do.
> Now what is the UNIX environment for?
> Is that for compatiblity and ease of transition
> since software is available for UNIX?
Yes, and also for ease of self-compilation. I'm not especially interested in running UNIX -- if you want to do that, UNIX is very good at running UNIX. That said, there is a real need for compilation and editors and such, and the sooner people live in the environment the better it will be.
> Is this going to hurt speed since it would
> be running a layer ontop of the EROS OS?
It could, but the preliminary evidence from my dissertation is that the UNIX environment should actually be *faster* if it is engineered correctly.
Please do not hesitate to post further questions to the cap-talk list: cap-talk@eros-os.org. I'ld also encourage you to subscribe to that list.
Jonathan S. Shapiro, Ph. D.
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Email: shapj@us.ibm.com
Phone: +1 914 784 7085 (Tieline: 863)
Fax: +1 914 784 7595