Chapter 11, now what?

[motoslide]

I just thought I'd start a conversation, which I hope will present a few different viewpoints. This forum has been very helpful for me, and I can see that most of the "regulars" have years of experience.

Now that SCO has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (which doesn't mean they are gone (yet)), I feel it's time to migrate our Clients to something else. Or at least offer an alternative. It's getting increasingly difficult to sell a solution running on SCO.

Our primary application is a character-based accounting package. We have a few add-ins which utilize PERL and/or TCP sockets. I've stuck with SCO primarily because it's what we are most familiar with. Our comfort level and knowledge is beneficial to our Clients.

Time to switch:
Which flavor of Linux? Most of our Client's have 6 to 100 users. Do we stick with System-V printing or embrace CUPS?
Any stories from the trenches is appreciated. Sorry for making this post so long!

"Proof that there is intelligent life in Oregon. Well, Life anyway.

 

[edfair]

Well, Monday will tell. And Tuesday, if the BK judge refuses it based on theft and Judge Kimble gets it back. And Wednesday, which is probably the earliest the hammer could drop.

I've tried an earlier RH and current slackware for the character based stuff I support and found both with issues.

But as one who hasn't worried about MS dropping support of DOS, I'm not too worried about losing SCO support for the near term.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[eyedoc1975]

Motoslide,
I have enjoyed various posts in the past from you and other Gurus which have been extreemly useful for me. Thank you for sharing all your knowledge. Apple O.S. X is based on BSD Unix and it can be ported to Intel CPU based hardware. Could this be an easy migration option? Hope to hear from other experts.

 

[piperent]

I'm going to take a look at Solaris. Version 10 is free, so what have I got to lose. It's supposedly a close kin to SysV so for my character clients it might just do the trick. I have already received the version CD's and am just trying to find time to get it installed. I'm gone so much that it's hard to squeeze it in. I'll post back once I've done so and let you know the outcome. It may crater like a rock, but then again, it might just be rock solid. Maybe some of the Solaris contingent could chime in.

piperent

 

[motoslide]

Thanks for the replies. I'm currently looking at Red Hat and SuSE. Both appear nearly identical. I hadn't thought about Solaris, thanks for that idea as well.



"Proof that there is intelligent life in Oregon. Well, Life anyway.

 

[piperent]

Well, as I said, once I get Solaris installed I'd post back. The install is now complete and as expected, it is very similar to SysV. But, like so many other OS's, they too have migrated everything to ELF format. This is probably a good thing, but it plays havoc with any old a.out or coff executables. I'm still researching to see if there is any solution available to get these old applications to run, but I don't hold out much hope. While I can get the libraries in the right places, the kernel just simply runs into a brick wall. I have even tried 'binutils/objcopy' to convert some of the old programs to 'elf' and even that fizzles. As for Solaris itself, it seems to be on par with many of the available Linux OS's. I haven't gone far enough to evaluate it's functionality, but if I can't get some of these old apps to run, I'd have to say it's about as useful (or useless) as any of them.

piperent