Moving from SCO to Linux

[Brian K. White]

Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 05:34:31PM -0400, Brian K. White wrote:
>>> MenuMaestro will indeed run under linux-abi (which isn't even the
>>> same code as linux-iBCS), but you need to tweak things a little bit.
>>
>> Not so sweeping please.
>> Many people who have mm have xenix-286 binaries of it. They will
>> _not_ work. If you have a xenix-386 binary or later, they should
>> work, and apparently do, given your comment.
>
> My Menu*Maestro* binaries are all 5.0/COFF; I've never *seen* a Xenix
> binary.  Did they even build Maestro for Xenix?  I thought 2.3.4 was
> EOL before Maestro came out.
>
> Now, Menu*Master*, yes, *lots* (approaching 1.0) of those are Xenix.
> I can't say whether *current* Linux-ABI can run those; I haven't any
> to test with.  *Early* (ca Linux 2.0-2.2) ABI is known not to.
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra

xenix-286 binaries were briefly supported in linux 1.something using iBCS.o
note: not the later iBCS2.o, nor any version of linux-abi

Linux did it's typical Linux thing and changed, making it theoretically
still possible but not easy to support 286 binaries anymore, and no one ever
happened to feel like doing the work.

You *can* still get the last version of linux and iBCS that did support 286
binaries. Maybe with hardware being so incredibly faster and bigger since
then, you could even manage to install a minimal copy of an old version of
linux and run it inside bochs or vmware or something, on a current version,
and maybe even manage to cobble up some kind of wrapper that lets you run
the binary from the main OS, kind of like a rcmd/rsh script that runs a
program that only really exists on a neighboring box but pases along all the
command line options and connects your stdin/stdout/stderr so it looks like
it's running locally. I've done that for someone when they needed to keep
using an app that didn't exist for the platform they'd just migrated to.
(vsifax, linux on AS/400, actually worked great except for some completely
unrelated network card driver problems)

I *wouldn't* for this but it's amusing to imagine just what might be
technically possible. Then again, sometimes things only seem outlandishly
wacky until you get desperate enough to consider trying it anyways. Then
years later and you're still using it, it seems less wacky somehow. :)

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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