Unix 3.2 woes (somewhat longish)

Dave Shevett shevett at labii.UUCP
Mon Nov 27 04:19:55 AEST 1989


Great, so I get the new SCO Unix 3.2 for my lil' ol 386 and say to myself, 
'Self, never will you have to argue with makefiles that have a hard time
with Xenix...  Never again to hack through code to make it xenixable...'

4 installations of this darned thing later, I STILL can't get a thing to
compile or run correctly.  Summary of problems follows (most serious to
most annoying...  order may adjust due to mood)

1 - Merge/386 will not load 'tall.  When executing the installation script,
  I get 2 unresolved externals during the kernal relink.   This has
  happened EVERY time I've installed.  With or without UFA1, UFA2 or the
  manual link kit.  (note - VP/ix DOES seem to work fairly well) 

2 - On the link kit matter - It seems the distributed link kit that is
  seperate from the standard link kit (if this seems vague, it is.  If I
  do things a certain way, ths sytem asks for those link disks...)  If I 
  install them, NOTHING works from then on.  Kernel relinks fail miserably,
  and nothing, I mean nothing will compile.

3 - Xsight.  I got the runtime to run fairly well, though 1 out of 3 times
  the mouse will not work (serial mouse, mkdev'ed on tty1a).  Oh, here's a
  good one, my logitech 2 button mouse works fine, but the 3 button mouse
  won't work at all.  What is wrong with this picture?  Another hassle is 
  if I manage to terminate an Xterm window (oops!  Hit ^D here...) the 
  system dies a horrible death.  No multiscreens, no functioning at all.  
  Once time I rebooted, and Xwindows wouldn't come up at all!  Eegads.

3a - Xsight dev kit - Is there no installation script for this?  I did the
  manual tar'ing of the disks onto the system, but could not get ANYTHING
  to compile.  More errors than I could count.  I tried making 'imake' in
  /usr/lib/X11/utils/imake (i think), but that came up with 3 errors.  This
  isn't anything fancy folks, a simple makefile, a simple c program.  This
  IS distribution, isn't it?

4 - Using the normal Dev kit, I tried to get Elm to compile (mailx is nice,
  but I have users who still look for the 'any' key).  I compiled Patch to
  install the multitudes of patches necessary.  That seemed to go ok, but I
  cannot run my patches properly.  Aside from Unix's annoying habit of not
  truncating long filenames (shar just says 'cannot create'), the patch
  program would stop halfway through a patch and say 'this isn't a pl xx
  file'...  Looking at the file, a patchlevel seems to have been skipped.
  This may be a local problem, but we're kinda stuck -- I must get news,
  elm, and some other applications running SOON, lest I be fried in my
  tracks by management...

Its very disconcerting getting a new product, which I am still
wholeheartedly supporting, and finding out it has so many problems.  It's
awfully large (70 meg or so for the whole shebang, Xsight, tcp/ip, and
nfs), it's noticeably slower than SCO 2.3.x, (I have an ESDI 150megger now
with a WD1007e on it, that cooks along nicely), and seems to throw up on
anything I hand it.

Could some kind souls help me through these dilemmas?

/--------------------+ 'The shortest distance +------------------\
|    Dave Shevett    |  between two puns is a | Labyrinth II BBS |
| shevett at labii.UUCP |  straight line...'     |  W. Trenton, NJ  |
\--------------------+       - Doc Webster    +------------------/



More information about the Comp.unix.i386 mailing list