The Taming of the SCO

On many occasions I have done battle with the dark forces of SCO Unix. On this page I chronicle some of my victories.

Unless you buy the SCO Unix development system, SCO Unix 3.2v4.2 has no C library or header files. This makes compilation of programs almost impossible. However, it is possible through valiant effort to bootstrap a development system using GNU tools. I have done this with some moderate success. Udo Munk has been kind enough to donate space on his FTP server to hold it. I've also put the most useful parts of this suite on Tripod.

The development system I worked on is missing libsocket, which is not part of the GNU libc version 1 which I used. (GNU libc version 2 does not currently support SCO Unix 3.2v4.2). However, even with the official SCO Unix development system installed, compiling programs can still be an arduous undertaking. I recently ported rdist 6.1.3 to SCO Unix. See the gruesome results.

SCO Trivia

• How many times does the word Microsoft appear in the /usr/include directory of SCO Unix 3.2v4.2 with the SCO development system?
  • 102, not counting subdirectories
  • 371, counting subdirectories
  • 373 if you count the two non-capitalized instances in mouse.h

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