moving from SCO to Linux

[Bill Vermillion]

Putting quill to paper and scribbling furiously on Fri, Jul 23 17:15  
Fairlight missed achieving immortality when he said: 

> The honourable and venerable Jeremy Anderson spoke thus:

> > SuSE is a consideration as well.  I've always liked Mandrake's
> > responsiveness to Security issues, and they make an excellent desktop

> Responsiveness? When SANS was still doing notifications of
> vendor fix releases for vulnerabilities, Mandrake was often in
> the last group of vendors to fix things. Turbo and Connectiva
> were often faster. RH and SuSE were usually the fastest.

> > Deprived of the `uname -a` command, I find myself frustrated.  Digging
> > through sysadm, I have harvested the following answers:

> Try uname -X on SCO.  

> > UNIX System Release 4.0, UNIX System Version 3.0 On another screen, I

> *laugh* THAT is outright wrong. Not that you related it, but
> that it says that anywhere. SCO made a conscious decision NOT
> to go SVR4, and everything they have is SVR3 and then custom
> modified by them. They decided to carve their own path, and at
> some point said as much when they came under critiism for being
> late to adopt R4 standards.

The conscious decision was because the costs for licesning VR4
were very high. 

> I thought not even UnixWare was SVR4...just a custom SVR3. This
> one I could be wrong on. But OpenServer is definitely R3.

Nope.  Unix ware was a pure SVR4 system - the one SCO didn't
license from Novell.  Then they bought Unix [the courts still have
yet to decided what they did get as both sides disagree] and
their first Unixware was just a cleaned up Unixware 2.1 ?? from
Novell. [I still have the original Novell red box versions].

After some modifications the 2.x became Unixware 7.

Going into Unixware 2.x for the first time is almost like booting
up Sys VR2 direct from AT&T on something like a 3B2.  The interface
is crude.

But it had what the V3's didn't.  You did not have to relink
kernels to add/move SCSI devices.  The automatic detection of added
devices while the system was running was one.  If you changed
DAT drives and it appeared on a new ID, it found that too, and
changed things.  It really was a pretty  decent OS by the time
they got to the UW 7.

Migrations from the OSR5 to the UW7 wasn't that hard.
My biggest chore on migrating one system was manually re-adding
the 72 printers, as those just weren't readily convertible.  

The UW7 had a much faster file system than the OSR5.


-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com