SCO ODT v1.1 - ODT-VIEW Anomaly

BBS Administration bbs at alchemy.UUCP
Sat Jun 1 14:50:54 AEST 1991


I've got several problems that need to be solved with my installation of
SCO ODT v1.1, but for now I'll ask for help on only this one:

I had a difficult time getting my system to work with my ethernet card. It
is a Western Digital 16-bit card, and apparently, the "wdn" driver used by
ODT does not really work too well with it (I was told the driver is made for
the WD8003 8-bit version, but that it can be made to work with the 16-bit
version). I any case, my first attempt at installation failed (I had the
ethernet card in place during the install and installed the "whole system"
using the "Automatic" installation). Today, I took the card out and
started over, installing manually and selecting only ODT-OS and the
TCP/IP portion of ODT-NET (which installed the ODT-VIEW system by itself).

Once this was installed and seemed to be working okay, I decided to try
to install the ethernet card. It did take some doing, but eventually I
got it to work. I could still "ping" and run ODT-VIEW with no problems.
I then decided to install the "Update F" that came with ODT v1.1 and
was supposed to fix and enhance various portions of the system. After
this, I decided to install the "Server Upgrade" floppy as well since
we were going to be testing the PC-Interface Server by (eventually)
attaching a '286 machine to this machine (the ethernet card in the ODT
machine has both ends of its BNC connector terminated with the thin-net
50 ohm terminators at present). The server upgrade disk is v1.1 as well.

After this, the kernel was relinked and I rebooted. At startup, everything
seemed to be working fine, until I decided to login as "odt" and try to
launch a Unix shell (either by double-clicking on the ODT-OS icon, or
by selecting "New Window" from the root menu, etc.). The "odtterm" (or
maybe it's an xterm) is launched, but as soon as ANY key is pressed
within this new window, the window closes. No crash, no corrupted windows
or anything, it just acts like you selected "Close" from its window menu
or something. Very strange! Of course, this makes using ODT-VIEW rather
useless since "Help", "Sysadmsh", "Mail" and many other icons/programs
rely on "odtterm/xterm" to function properly.

I was hoping someone might have experienced this and could say "It was 
when you installed the 'Update F' disk, do this..." or "The Server Upgrade
messes that up, do this...". The truly interesting thing about this is
that we originally had ODT v1.0 and encountered this same situation.
Everything, eventually, worked fine except that launching an "xterm"
from ODT-VIEW would result in the same action: the window closes once
you press any key (this is, well, not totally, but sort of primarily
why we wanted ODT v1.1 thinking it would solve this problem). I'm
wondering if it's a hardware related problem now. Any hints or help
are greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

-- John

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