Date: Tue, 15 Aug 1995 03:19:32 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: current@FreeBSD.org Subject: WordPerfect and Z-Mail for SCO - success! Message-ID: <4678.808481972@time.cdrom.com>
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It's probably too early to go shouting about this, but what the heck.. Working from some of Soren's original concepts and with substantial help from the NetBSD code base, tonite Steven Wallace handed me an iBCS2 LKM that was able to successfully run both the WordPerfect and Z-Mail (from Z-code Software, now part of NCD) demos I had lying around. Z-Mail had a few wrinkles, most notably that any mail sent from it seems to go into the bit-bucket (I suspect that it's not even looking for sendmail in the right place, if at all), but hey - it comes up and runs and you can even read mail from it. Pretty slick! The WordPerfect demo is even slicker.. All the preferences dialogs seem to work and you can do everything from loading complex documents to selecting fairly complex font and color options. There were some changes from NetBSD's sed required to make the WordPerfect installation run all the way through, but they were fairly minor and once brought across had the installation running like a champ. I still think that we should make our default echo do the right thing with '\c' automatically since I don't see that it loses us anything and it makes SCO shell script output look a lot nicer, but that's really a small and somewhat religious nit.. I was really very impressed that so much of WordPerfect ran on the first try. I didn't go through every menu and dialog, but everything I tried just worked. This is impressive! I remember being at a USENIX a year or so back where BSDI was showing off their SCO emulation to great general gloating and fanfare. On the screen was a copy of WordPerfect, though you couldn't resize or fiddle with it too much or the server would crash (not their fault I think, actually, they were running a pretty green version of Xaccell on a then-very-new Matrox card). Well, tonite I saw the same thing on FreeBSD and I was able to play with it without crashing the server! :-) I know that both Soren and Steven have had WordPerfect up before this, but for me at least it was a significant milestone. Now to work on getting this into -current so all the rest of you can play too! The changes required to bring this in should be fairly minimal, but out of fairness to Soren and all the work he's done so far, I'm going to hold off for a little while before running ahead with the NetBSD code. He deserves a chance to at least look it over and make some comments about how this should all be done. So.. SCO emulation and as a dynamically loadable module at that. Is that studly, or what? :-) Jordan
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