[ale] Virtualizing SCO OpenServer 5.x

[Neal Rhodes]

Mike probably has gotten farther with virtualization of SCO than I
have.  

First off, if you didn't have the very lastest final version of SCO, it
didn't have hardware support for so much of what we now take for
granted.    IDE, USB.    And does anyone remember how painful it was to
recompile the kernel to add support for additional drivers?   I recall
trying to install on maybe 5.0.4 and it was a flop. 

Before you go down that road of trying to virtualize, I'd ask precisely
WHY they cannot migrate to Linux.   I have had some good results
migrating Business Basic applications and DBs intact to Linux systems
from SCO.   It is a bit easier to convince the client to make this jump
when their SCO hardware fries and all they have is a backup tape.    Are
they truly on some dead-end language that cannot migrate? 

Regarding transfer, I hate to give away my age, but what about hanging
any desktop on a serial port and using Kermit?  Or UUCP?  Yes, it will
take a while to transfer at 38400, but what's time to a pig? 

Neal


On Tue, 2014-04-15 at 20:13 -0400, Michael H. Warfield wrote:

> On Tue, 2014-04-15 at 19:17 -0400, Jim Lynch wrote:
> > On 04/15/2014 03:21 PM, Beddingfield, Allen wrote:
> > > I don't think there is enough free disk space on the original system to make that backup
> > I don't have any SCO experience, but can you attach (and use) a USB 
> > harddrive?
> 
> Oh, I remember that too.  Yes and no.
> 
> Yes, you can (maybe) after getting the appropriate drivers enabled and
> recompile the kernel with that.  I think I remember doing that.  Painful
> experience.  I think I remember I gave up on the effort but that was a
> long time ago.
> 
> No, in that SCO is not going to understand any ext* file system, Linux
> is not (I don't think) understand that antiquated sv5* file system, and
> VFAT, NTFS, or other lowest common denominator isn't going to cut it
> because of file attributes (which is why I probably gave up).
> 
> You could do a tar backup to it (again - you gotta enable those drivers
> and rebuild the kernel) on a VFAT file system (subject to file length
> limits on VFAT) and then extract them.  I don't think I ever tried using
> NTFS with SCO.
> 
> Neil Rhodes might have better advice.  He's also done work on SCO.  I
> put this behind me over a decade ago.
> 
> > Jim
> 
> Regards,
> Mike
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