V/386 unlimited upgrade

[Bill Kennedy]

There are some real knee-breaker problems with the unlimited user upgrades
for V/386 and since I haven't seen anything about them before, I'll share
my (dismal) experience.  Since I was the one begging for moderation in the
criticism of Microport I won't scream as loud as I'd like, but the document-
ation is in a word *CRUMMY*.  One page for run time and just a features
repeat for Merge (wouldn't be bad if it was accurate or applicable).

I started from a two user Merge system, maybe that was the mistake.  The
run time upgrade was relatively effortless, you have to remember to do the
mv`ing that they are going to undo for you, run time is oblivious of Merge.
Merge was the "bitch-kitty".  Nothing tells you to uninstall Merge until
you try to upgrade.  When you do get it uninstalled it complains to you
about your having to restore init.orig and getty.orig which, of course you
can't do because they are running.  You have to boot up from your build
diskette and cancel the installation procedure, mount the root file system
onto the floppy /mnt.  Remember that there is no ls on the floppy so you
have to use the one in /mnt/bin (the hard disk).  Now you can mv init.orig
and getty.orig back to their premerge init and getty.  Remember to umount
the hard disk and gracefully shut down the floppy system sync; sync;uadmin 2 0

At this point, after the reboot, you are running unlimited run time and are
ready to install Merge.  Since no instructions came with it, I intuit that
you do it just like two user merge.  No flames for cockpit error please,
there were *no* instructions.  The Merge installation proceeds normally
through the reboot and when you run /usr/lib/merge/dosinstall you get a series
of VM86_DIED messages as it tries to make DOS images.  That's a well documented
error message, it says that DOS caught a signal and died or died for some
other reason.  There are so many messages in V/386 they tell you to ignore,
I ignored it.  WRONG!  There are no DOS images, so Merge won't run, nada, at
all.  Groping through the dosinstall and mkimg scripts I think it has
something to do with /tmp being a separate file system on a separate spindle,
but that's groping.

This is a "vanilla" system, the second hard disk was added with their addisk
script.  Has anyone gotten unlimited Merge upgrade to work?  What (besides
buying it) did I do wrong?  It's not my intent to bedevil Microport here but
rather to describe a minefield that found me in hopes of sparing others the
grief.  The opinions are strictly my own, Tolerant just lets me use their gear.

Bill Kennedy {rutgers,cbosgd,ihnp4!petro}!ssbn!bill or bill at ssbn.WLK.COM