How Do You Solve the Multi-OS Development Nightmare?

[Peter Funk]

adnan at sgtech.uucp (Adnan Yaqub) writes:

[...about installing some flavour of PC-UNIX from tape...]
ay> not other common OS companies.  Is any one doing this?  Do you have
ay> any other ideas on how to solve this nightmare?

It is our practice to install SCO Xenix from streamer cartridge tape. 
We have prepared a special BOOT N1 Floppy for this purpose :
A small shell script calls 'fdisk' and 'divvy -b 1 -c 1 -i' and so on.
Afterwards the OS is installed using 'cpio -icvdumB < /dev/erct0'
from cartridge tape.

Someone, who is involved in driver development, should be able to
prepare such a shell-beast in at least one hour.  Take the original 
installation shell script provided by SCO as an example.  
Branding and serialization is also possible, if you need so : 
you must copy the original unbranded versions of libsys.a
and getty onto the tape or else onto the prepared boot disk.  

This procedure cuts the time needed for the complete OS-Installation 
(including several applications as well) down to about 15 Minutes.
Using the standard floppy-disk approach is indeed a nightmare. :-)

A special hint: you need to copy 'mkdir' to the /bin directory of
the boot disk, or 'cpio' will not work otherwise. It is good 
practise, to copy some other useful tools to that bootup disk
also.  The 'emergency boot disk' created by 'mkdev fd' is
nearly useless, since 'cp', 'rm', 'ls', 'rmdir'... are missing.

Just another (not so serious) question : 
  How do you solve the multiple peripheral device nightmare ?  
Exotic peripherals, such as an IEEE-488 coupled color photocopier 
(the CANON CLC 500) or an EXAbyte SCSI tape for instance, cann't 
be saved to tape ;-) and are also heavily needed during driver 
development and testing.  They are also even more expensive 
than harddisks... :-(
-=-
Peter Funk \\ ArtCom GmbH, Schwachhauser Heerstr. 78, D-2800 Bremen 1
Work at home: Oldenburger Str.86, D-2875 Ganderkesee 1/+49 4222 6018 (8am-6pm)
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