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From: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net>
Message-Id: <199611161734.MAA00747@dyson.iquest.net>
Subject: Re: "free" SCO O/S
To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith)
Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 12:34:09 -0500 (EST)
Cc: chat@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199611161348.AAA11428@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Nov 17, 96 00:18:09 am
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> 
> Ok, so I get a prompt for the BTLD disk, and insert it.  Only it
> appears that the 'slha' driver isn't on the disk.  Or perhaps I
> mistyped it.  At any rate, this section from the SCO manual is
> pertinent :
> 
>            NOTE  If there are any errors during this extraction (linking)
>            process, the process is aborted and you are forced to reboot.
> 
> Like hell I am.  Stick it back on the shelf and worry about it some 
> other time.  Anyone tells me FreeBSD is difficult to install is going
> to get laughed out of the room.
> 
You need to get the BTLD disk from the symbios site.  It took me
a long time (a few weeks of picking away at it) until I found this
out (since I don't know anyone running the turkey.)  Once I got it
running, I was disappointed.  The darned thing is "license-manager"
city.  It also has lots of bogus symbolic links into wierd places
for the various system binaries.  Ugly...  BTW, at least I could
get FreeSCO to boot (after some agony.)  I had Solaris 2.5.1 for
a week or so, and could never get it to work (and the friend who
owns it couldn't either on his machines.)

FreeSCO is not a stellar performer, but it does have much faster
metadata perf (they have worked on the filesystem alot since I last
used SVR3.X.)   Otherwise, it is a bit sluggish.

John