XBBS under Interactive

[Jack F. Vogel]

In article <72 at nstar.UUCP> root at nstar.UUCP (Larry Snyder) writes:
>Has any tried running the XBBS binaries under Interactive Unix '386?
>I am currently running SCO 2.3.1 and am considering switching to  
>Interactive Unix with the special 75% off deal and was wondering if
>XBBS (along with all my usenet stuff) will run as Interactive claims.
 
I can not say for sure about the XBBS binaries, I decided after turnkey
relocated that I was not really interested in running a BBS any longer,
however, I have taken the usenet stuff right off a cpio tape made running
SCO and loaded it back under ISC 2.0.1 and it is running fine. I have also
had occasion to run other miscellaneous binaries until I got around to
recompiling source and I have not yet run into anything that wouldn't work.
So I would strongly suspect that you would have no problems. But then, what's
the big deal in recompiling an archive or two :-} ??

A word or two about this conversion you are considering. First off, ISC being
a full 3.2 implementation takes more memory. turnkey has 3 meg, which was more
than enough under Xenix 2.3.1 but under some circumstances I notice it swapping
with ISC. I am about to upgrade to 8 meg to alleviate this problem. Also, talk
to someone technical at Interactive with regard to any special hardware you
might have in your system. DON'T TAKE THE SALES TYPES WORD FOR IT!! I spent 2
months converting over and getting turnkey back up and running due to 
incorrect information given me on their 800 sales line! Like whether my tape
drive was supported and whether my RLL drives needed firmware entries in order
to work. I was told yes to the first and no to the latter and both turned out
to be false!! I also had fun getting the installation to work AT ALL!

With all that being said you might ask, "Why go to ISC??", well as a developer
I can handle a few glitches here and there. And I really like having X11R3
with 800x600 resolution with a good chunk of the contributed distribution.
Interactive's X has support for something like 10 high resolution boards. I
don't think anyone else tops them yet. And I now have both my RLL drives and
Archive tape working. In fact, with all the little problems ironed out, I am
extremely pleased with the system. I have ported the GNU gcc compiler and am
nearly finished getting g++ to work as well. Try that under SCO where the
assembler won't assemble compiler output!! (does SCO 3.2 still only have masm,
or did they now include the ATT assembler??)

Well, enough ramblings, I would say look before you leap, but for those with
the knowhow (or luck maybe) I would highly recommend ISC.

Naturally, the standard disclaimer applies!

--
Jack F. Vogel			jackv at seas.ucla.edu
AIX Technical Support	              - or -
Locus Computing Corp.		jackv at ifs.umich.edu