SCO Unix Features

[Rick Stout]

Hi Netters.

Well SCO told me the best way to get a response from their
tech support people was by e-mail.  Almost a week now and still
no response.  And *I'm* in their ODT developers program!

I do have to qualify this somewhat.  There is one particular 
person in their tech support department that has always been
extremely helpful, timely and courteous when I have e-mailed
him directly.  But I thought I'd return the kind gestures and
go through the proper chanels (sco!support) so as not to wear
out my welcome.  

Alas I to turn to the net.

Here are my questions.

1) Professional does not appear to work under 3.2.  The program
	executes fine, but you cannot enter a number.  You can enter text
	or formulas fine, but when you try to enter a number into a cell
	you get an error 'Formula needs to be broken down'.

2) On my Compaq portable 386 when I boot Unix, often the date or
	time is wrong.  The date and time is correct if you run setup or
	DOS.  What is really interesting is that it is seldom more than
	a few hours off.  Occasionally it is off a whole day.  I might
	think it was a hardware problem on the part of my particular
	Compaq but a friend with the identical machine has the same
	problem.

3) An intermittant problem with the floppy drive under VP/ix.  It
	won't issue an error message but will write garbled data.
	tar works fine under unix and the floppy works fine under native
	DOS.  Yes, I'm running VP/ix with ODT.  To be fair I haven't 
	completely tested the Merge product, but my first impressions
	were not great.  (Flight Simulator is virtually unusable under
	Merge; at least in a window).

4) I knocked myself out trying to get a Logitech serial mouse to work
	with ODT.  It works fine under DOS and a Microsoft mouse works fine
	under ODT but the Logitech mouse arrow just hugs the left side of
	the screen and acts as if I've gone nuts with the buttons.  Never
	had a problem with a Microsoft mouse.

5) Using vi over a modem.  This could be tough because I upgraded to
	this Compaq Portable 386 with built-in internal modem at the same
	time I began using ODT instead of Xenix 386.  The built-in 
	internal modem is supposedly a hayes product.  The command set
	works except for at&v which I can live without.  Anyway, vi seems
	to be the only program I have trouble with over the modem.  Say
	the cursor is on a word at the beginning of a line of text and you
	want to move to some word in the middle of the line.  The 'w'
	command is reasonable to skip from word to word.  However when
	you use it, the cursor moves but blanks out the characters it has
	passed totally screwing up the line.  Sometimes returning to the
	beginning of the line and moving to the right a character at a 
	time will restore the line (a la '^llllllll') but sometimes it
	doesn't.

6) Thanks to those of you who have not hit 'n' already because of the
	length of this. :-)  I think this one may have been discussed already
	but I wasn't paying attention. :-(  Some things you don't think
	will happen to you and you can't read *everything* on the net.

   I set up the uucp network on this system the same way I have set
	up dozens of Xenix 386 boxes.  Why can't I get it to send mail
	to another machine?  I've tested the connection with uuinstall
	and it tests fine.  Am I missing something fundamentally different
	with SCO Unix vs SCO Xenix?  Do I have to do something like run
	'uucico -r1' every minute out of the uucp cron file or something?

	With Xenix the system will just automatically try connecting after
	you send mail to a remote machine.

Has anyone else run into these *features*?

Thanks!
-Rick
________________________________________________________________________________
Rick Stout                                                ...uunet!eysd!rick
Ernst & Young, San Diego                            
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