Wednesday, September 27, 2006
SNR for September 27, 2006
- The only news item for about the 9/25 PSJ storm is another GL article. It may have gotten all the trade press coverage it's going to get. That's not so surprising, really, since nothing was actually decided on the 25th, and nothing will be resolved for quite some time yet. So if you're in the "wake me when it's over" camp, you can hit the snooze button again. Pleasant dreams.
- The story's also showed up on Digg, if you're into that.
- A few PSJ-related items from the blogosphere, from E-Scribe News, OrangeCrate, CBR's Open Source blog, Limulus (check out those kewl graphics, and the reference to the Boston molasses flood).
- Ooh, another huge pile of docs on PACER. I'll get to 'em once I've read the earlier ones, so it may be a while yet.
- A blurb at AntiBrokers about the stock tanking. "Let it die in peace", they argue.
- Tony Lawrence is no longer following SCO.
He mentions this while responding to a question about an especially nasty behavioral difference between OpenServer 6 and 5.x. And by 'nasty' I don't just mean because vi is involved. Vi, or some versions of it, has this misfeature where you can encrypt files from the editor in a highly non-intuitive way. People have been accidentally garbling files and losing data for years, no, decades, with this misfeature. You couldn't do it with OSR 5.x, but OSR6 now lets you really shoot yourself in the foot with vi. Fantastic.
My short and unhelpful answer to the hapless user: Next time, don't use OpenServer, and don't use vi. - From comp.unix.sco.misc, a tale of woe about UnixWare's broken large (>2 GB) file support. Sure, the filesystem supports large files, but the shell doesn't. It must've been compiled without large file support enabled, and since the thing's closed source there's no easy way to fix it. I don't know how large file support works on SCO OSes, but on every platform I've used it's not exactly rocket science. You just pass a couple of #defines to the compiler (LARGEFILE_SOURCE, LARGEFILE64_SOURCE), make sure your code doesn't assume off_t is a 32-bit value (and surely you weren't doing that, were you?), and you're good to go.
Sadly, the poster's stuck with SCO, or at least his company thinks it is:
I'd love to just go all Linux, cos bash seems to be more manly, but my company has agreements with SCO, and we all know what is going on there, don't we....... - An unanswered UW question from back in August, a guy wondering if/how to run SCO binaries on Linux or BSD, since OpenServer doesn't support his new laptop's chipset. I would guess the answer involves the iBCS package on Linux, except that I don't know whether anyone's maintaining it anymore. Lack of demand and all, ya see...
- Daniel Lyons has a new article up, titled "The New Barbarians". I'm not ready to say the guy's finally seen the light, but the article is about open source and commodity hardware transforming the industry, and (unless I missed) it he went the whole article without calling Linux users minions of Pol Pot or any nonsense like that. So there seems to be some progress here. Forbes as a whole isn't bashing Linux and pumping SCO like they used to. Must've dawned on them there was no percentage in it.
- In case you're (morbidly) curious about running an old copy of OpenServer under VMWare, the answer is here, sort of. At least from a technical standpoint. Legally it's anyone's guess. Maybe if you do you're in violation of the EULA and SCO sends the mattress tag police after you.
- From PacketStorm: This is what a st00pid buffer overflow exploit looks like on UnixWare 7.1.3. Because using a keyboard under X11 is just so cutting edge and untested and complicated and all.
- I saw a seemingly-new item titled SCO updates Unix product, open-source attitude, which caught my eye to say the least. And no, there's no updated product, and no adjusted attitude. The piece is from December '04, and only showed up as new because a blogspammer posted a "reply" a couple of days back. This all seems very fitting, somehow.
- Another bit that came up as a current news item for some reason: If you're using SCO Unix (version unspecified), and you really, really want to print yourself some bar codes with your SCO Unix box, today is your lucky day. Here's a site where you can download a free demo of a $700 commercial barcode printing app. So for all you poor SCO users out there (yes, both of you), you can't say I've never tried to help you out.
By brx0 @ 1:16 PM 
