Recipe for migrating from SCO to Linux

[Fairlight]

You'll never BELIEVE what scooter6 at gmail.com said here...:
> I am strongly entertaining the thought of migrating our company OFF
> of SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 onto a flavor of Linux.  Has anyone written a
> recipe for doing this, step-by-step?  I realize I have to get different
> licensing from filePro, etc. and if memory serves me correctly, they also
> have something that converts files from SCO to Linux?

No file conversion is necessary.  They're same-endian platforms.

Aside from making sure libtermcap is installed, and possibly twiddling your
termcap settings, there's really not much difference between moving
SCO->Linux as opposed to SCO->SCO if you were switching between systems.

> Amongst other things, my reasoning is getting a stronger platform as our
> company continues to grow rapidly.  We are up to about 60 end-users and
> still climbing.  I have heard that on a proper Linux server, indexing,
> amongst other things, run much quicker on Linux than on SCO?  Is this
> true? Can anyone confirm this?  In other words, if you took 2 IDENTICAL
> servers, one with SCO and one with Linux, and indexed the same file, is
> there a NOTICEABLE speed advantage on the Linux side?

There was a noticeable speed difference on identical hardware when filePro
on Linux was the SCO version and had to run under iBCS...it was still
faster than SCO native.  It's faster yet natively, in my experience.

> On a different note, I also want to look into converting our character
> based filePro to have more of a Windows feel, using more mouse than
> keyboard, etc. but I think that's a pretty large undertaking as our
> system has a LOT of different menus, data files, browses, etc.

And that's a bit of a dead end.  fileProGI is Windows-only.  Reface needed
a unix host, but I thought it was a Windows front end.

> But for now, I'm mainly looking for the conversion to Linux - speaking of
> which, does the community favor a specific Linux flavor over others?  I

Currently my pick is CentOS 5.4.

> will be looking to get a dual or quad processor server with a LOT of RAM,
> etc to assist in the speed aspect as well.  Currently, we use NetTerm on
> the end-users PC's to access filePro - and I will be looking to switch
> all of them to puTTy - is that do-able to whatever Linux platform we
> choose?

NetTerm!  I used to use that!  :)

PuTTY works with any host that runs telnetd or sshd.  That would include
all linux distributions.

> Any tips, tricks, pointers etc that you guys can contribute would all be
> appreciated.  Thanks

It's a broad area.  Most of it depends on any special needs you might have.
I mean...to me, administering a system is administering a system, when you
know the subsystems underneath it all.  So I really don't notice a
difference in terms of general procedure.  Things may be located in
different places between different distributions, but that's easy enough to
work around.

Given your line of questioning, perhaps it would be prudent to set up
VirtualBox on a Windows machine, install the Linux distribution of
preference under it as a guest OS, and install the fP demo onto that.  Get
the feel of it in general before making a full move, if you've not done
this stuff before.  You can even set up a bridged ethernet adapter so that
you can test out PuTTY directly to the virtual machine, test termcaps, etc.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis,