still working on the Wordperfect 5.1 problem

[Dave Ihnat]

In article <1990Nov12.222402.10070 at unixland.uucp> bill at unixland.uucp (Bill Heiser) writes:
>...  There's the catch:
>On VP/ix, it *isn't possible* to reference a "real" DOS partition!

I've not tried this, but it couldn't hurt (except your wallet.)  AT&T
has reworked VP/ix rather significantly; in particular, it readily supports
"real" DOS partitions.  (In addition, there are a lot of "edge-smoothing"
changes, plus the virtual device interface, that make it really usable.)  The
part I'm talking about that I've not tried is running AT&T's SimulTask with
other than AT&T's System V.  There's no reason I can see that it *shouldn't*
work, but...

Frankly, however, my first suggestion is to bag running WP under DOS emulation.
No matter what you do, you degrade the performance of your 386 system a *lot*
when running in emulation mode.  We've had good luck with WordPerfect's
native Unix product--in fact, even though it wasn't certified for AT&T
System V/386, but rather Xenix, it's been successfully running for a client
for over 6 months now.  The combination of WP Office (the Unix version of
the DOS "Library" product) and native Unix WP has worked out quite nicely,
although you may have to spend a while on the terminal setup before you turn
your users loose with it.  The only real complaint (other than minor bugs,
probably fixed in the now-supported native version) is that the keyboard
layout is different for different terminals--i.e., you no longer can memorize
"Alt-F7" for every case.  But this is an unavoidable side-effect of supporting
myriad different terminals in the new environment.

	Dave Ihnat
	ignatz at homebru.chi.il.us