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From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: WordPerfect on 386BSD?
Message-ID: <1993Jan9.214255.26478@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Keywords: wordperfect 386bsd compatibility
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University (Ogden, UT)
References: <93010913477@erato.iowa-city.ia.us>
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 93 21:42:55 GMT
Lines: 48
In article <93010913477@erato.iowa-city.ia.us> jdb@erato.iowa-city.ia.us (John D. Boggs) writes:
>
>I can't find anything in the FAQ about compatibility, so I'll offer up
>a question to the net at large.
>
>I want to be able to run WordPerfect on a unix box at home, and the good
>folks at WordPerfect Corporation have apparently never heard of 386BSD.
>So, is 386BSD binary compatible with the commercial flavor of Unix (what
>is that, system 5?) Has anyone got WordPerfect running on 386BSD?
Nope, not yet; the only binaries that will run on 386BSD that were compiled
to run on another box are the Mach BNR2SS binaries. Unfortunately, the
Mach BNR2SS is currently defunct (although there is someone beginning to
duplicate CMU's effors in this area by porting 386BSD to run as a hosted
OS on top of Mach (386BSDSS? 8-)).
I don't know what the official word is, but frobbing the system call table
through a pointer on process context switch (least expensive) or making
references relative to some pointer in the proc struct each call (more
expensive) would allows us to run binaries for any system we were willing
to write the system call glue routines for.
WordPerfect, in particular, is a difficult beast, not only because it expects
things to live in particular places (you can overcome that), but because it
likes to access the console (and Wyse-60) hardware with the driver in "scan
code mode". There are also a lot of expectations about XNwrap, number of
lines, color change escape sequences, etc., etc., which make it very demanding
of the console driver behaviour.
For instance, WP for SCO Xenix would require an entirely new console driver
to run on 386BSD *after* we got all the system calls behaving the same.
If you have X going, there has been a lot of recent work on the WYSIWYG
editor that comes with InterViews(sp?), and that may be your best bet
(unless you didn't want an editor to edit, but just to have WP).
Terry Lambert
terry@icarus.weber.edu
terry_lambert@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
--
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"I have an 8 user poetic license" - me
Get the 386bsd FAQ from agate.berkeley.edu:/pub/386BSD/386bsd-0.1/unofficial
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