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Replace OS Question...

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Jan 17, 2002
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I want to convert a server that is running SCO Open Server 5.0. How can I boot to a start up disk to begin a Windows install?
 
Boot w95 floppy, fdisk, format. All the normal stuff. If your server is DOS compatible the only thing is to delete the non-dos partition. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 
Good idea to replace SCO. However, by moving to Windows, you've merely jumped from the fire into the frying pan (Windows being only somewhat better than SCO - and worse in many respects). If you have any Unix knowledge at all, you should consider Linux or one of the BSD variants: get all the way out of the fire, or at least to a comfortable distance ;)

If you do install Windows, use Win2k - it's the only version I've ever used that doesn't have major stability issues. Flexibility isn't it's strong point, but that's a major weakness in any version of Windows.
 
Everybody has a love/hate relationship with some software/operating system. I go through days like that with SCO. Then I get into some win problems and fall back in like with SCO.
I like it simple, so on the win side I stay mostly with 95A, but had started to feel better about SE till I got bit in the rump last week by driver problems with a DSL modem. So I converted that machine back to 95A and cursed efficient networks and bellsouth for a while.
I've supported 2K. Don't need the glut. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
 
While what you say is true regarding most software (I've spent many a day cursing RedHat ;), SCO seems to be one that I've _never_ liked. I've used it off and on since 199[2|3]. The only good thing SCO ever did for me was lead me to Linux (I was so desperate to find a replacement, I was willing to give it a try - this was in 1994, Linux was practically unknown, so you can see how desperate I was).

Much of my problem with SCO goes beyond the software itself and directly to the company. SCO Unix is way overpriced, undersupported, and somehow, bloated despite being light in features (how is _that_ possible?). I was bitten by a bug in mkdev tape that prevented my kernel from linking. Informing SCO of this resulted in a "not a bug" response. Hrm. So much for the theory about commercial software being better supported :p I suppose if I had broke out my credit card I would have been pointed to a patch (which I later found on my own, but it didn't work - I had to reinstall anyway). This is unacceptable. I understand that a company can't provide free hand-holding, but they can at least be helpful.
Besides that, the filesystem layout is baroque (/var/opt/K/SCO/... etc), it's sloooow, forget the GUI (even the KDE on Skunkworks is so far out-of-date as to be irrelevant)... I could go on, but you undoubtedly already know the rest.

I'm working frantically to port our apps to Linux and hopefully, after that, I'll never have to see SCO again.
 
I won't disagree with you. In fact, although I used SCO as my desktop for many, many years, I switched to Linux a few months ago. I'm not switching back, but..

On this very same hardware, the SCO machine NEVER crashed. Not once. Red Hat Linux crashes, locks up, behaves erratically at least a couple of times per month. Now I'm willing to put up with that because of the other benefits I get, and it's also true that I am brutally hard on hardware and OSes, but still- SCO could take it, Linux can't.

I'm sure that will change.
Tony Lawrence
SCO Unix/Linux Resources tony@pcunix.com
 
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