termcap file, printing, porting

[Bill Vermillion]

Putting quill to paper and scribbling furiously on Thu, Jan 27 05:36  
T Crabtree missed achieving immortality when he said: 

> I have restored an older version of FilePro Plus 16
> (v.4) on SCO UNIX Release 3.2v4.0y. I received much
> assistance from the list to do this, and greatly
> appreciate it.

... [only answering one section - wjv]

> 3.)porting to Linux/BSD - I have tried to mount the
> floppies on Linux -- even recompiled to recongize
> Xenix FS -- but I had no luck. Same with FreeBSD. I
> have even tried to format a partition on a BSD drive
> to the Xenix FS. Has anyone had luck moving from old
> SCO to Linux or BSD without having to do a total
> rewrite. It's ridiculous that we are still using such
> old hardware and an OS that is unsupported. I'm trying
> to convince the owner to move to something more
> current.

You really NEVER want to use Xenix file systems except on Xenix
OSes.

On an old system I had a Xenix file system and the standard FFS
file system [which almost all FSes are based].  Access to the Xenix
file system was 5 to 10 times SLOWER than the real file system.

>From my experience you'll only be able to mount Xenix file systems
on SCO Unix, and at least some early Sys V.3 Unis systems.   I had
the Xenix fs running and mounted on my Esix system.  But SCO
was the last vendor to move to a V.4 environment with their
Unixware, and their current systems are sort of a hybrid with
some SysV.3 and some SysV.4

When you say your try to mount the floppies on Linux - just WHAT
floppies are these.  You neglected to say.  Most often floppies
are not set to run as muontable file systems - and are usually
the target for distribution and backups using tar or cpio systems.

If you are trying to extract tar/cpio files from old SCO systems
you'll need to use the floppy device that skips the first track
of the disk and starts on the second track.  That is typical of
Xenix file systems.

It's been so long since I've done that, I can't point you to the
correct fd parameters. I think that was in about '98 when I moved
the contents of 10+ year old floppies onto modern archivable media.
They all fit on 2 100MB zip drives and I gave away about 300 3.5"
media when done.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com