hacking SCO....

[Julian H. Stacey]

John Von Essen wrote:
> Unfortunately, I have inherited a Intel P200 with SCO OpenServer 5.0.4 
> with a 4Gb SCSI drive.

Condolences !  SCO is Horrible to work on, & a waste of time, erase ASAP !

........
> SCO is of no help, they cant provide replacement boot floppy, only sell 
> me complete distribution version 5.0.7 for $100.

> Any ideas on how I should go about this. All I need to do is get that 
> data from the tape onto the disk and I should good to go.

> SCO is of no help, they cant provide replacement boot floppy, only sell 
> me complete distribution version 5.0.7 for $100.

SCO used to give away licences free for 5.0.4 &/or 5.0.5 for 
restricted use. One could legally download cdrom images & burn them.
Good denough to rescue data & then erase SCO & install BSD

If you can't rescue the data while running FreeBSD, either:

Non Commercial solution:
	Look around find someone near who has a 5.0.4 or 5
	cdrom, (maybe even SCO site somewhere) get a copy, (cdrom
	contains floppy images too I recall), rescue data, delete
	SCO very quickly from your machine, (before you discover
	the pain of running SCO, (& if you really must run SCO then
	Do get their Skunkware CDROM too (yes that's it's real name!
	it's full of FSF/GNU stuff & free & makes using SCO rather
	less unpleasant (not unpleasant, just rather less).

Commercial solution.
	Pay the $100, if its for a commercial job it's cheap.  No
	point quibbling.  SCO used to cost about 2000 German
	Deutschmarks, for end users, (& was the Unix I found most
	crippled.  BSD is cheaper, but if it's for business, & it's
	their legal right, cheap enough.

There's SCO forums somewhere, but probably the wrong route.  Their
manuals used to just present work-rounds for obsolete old software
everyone else wasn't using anymore eg at one stage they were SVR3
& all other vendors were SVR4 based.  Last time I was contracted
to work on SCO, I just kept tossing more modern source eg X11R6 &
lesstif & GNU src/ on top of the base obsolete SCO, till obsolete
SCO libraries no longer broke my project. Reading SCO manuals was
a waste of time, better to just to rip it out & replace it with
better software, either per utility that annoys, or per whole OS.

-
Julian Stacey.  Unix,C,Net & Sys. Eng. Consultant, Munich.  http://berklix.com
Mail in Ascii, Html dumped as Spam.  Ihr Rauch = mein allergischer Kopfschmerz.