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In article <193@puff.wisc.edu> plocher@puff.WISC.EDU (John Plocher) writes:
>In article <255@c3pe.UUCP> lenn@c3pe.UUCP (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.) writes:
>>In article <6158@sun.uucp>, (Don Jackson) writes:
>>> ... get netnews up and running on an IBM-AT running Xenix...
>>I have a similar question.  I have been trying to get news to compile
>>on an Intel 310 running Xenix 286 3.0, without success.  Any clues?
>
>I have Xenix 2.00 (Microsoft) on an AT, and B-news 2.10.{2,3}...
>  Microsoft does not provide (doccument?) a way for the user to fill
>in the fields returned by uname().  If you define XENIX, the news sw
>assumes a working uname(), not their replacement code.

I have SCO Xenix, but will try to answer your questions.  I believe that
SCO Xenix is very similar to your IBM Xenix.  First of all, it is pretty
easy to get uname to return the correct node name.  In the directory
/usr/sys/conf there is a file called 'master'.  Towards the end of the
file,  you will see a line that says:  node  NODE  "Xenix286".  Just
edit your sitename in, save the file and type make to make a new kernel.
Install it as /xenix, reboot and you have a working uname call.

>  The code in pathinit.c(AllocCpy()) does not seem to work - I get
>segmentation faults when it is called - use strdup() instead of AllocCpy()

I have heard a number of people complain that the uname call in pathinit
messes up the stack.  I believe that these people were using the medium
model of the compiler.  I used the small model, and my inews work just
fine.  If worse comes to worse, you can always use /usr/include/whoami.h
code included for v7 compatibility.

>  The compress program won't work as is on the 286 processor and Xenix
>cuz of 64K segment limits... There is a hacked version which runs
>with MicroPort's SYS-V product, though.

The distributed version of compress works perfectly, just define pcxt
when you compile it.  It only does the 12-bit compress, but that is
an unfortunate side effect of the 80286 architecture.

In short, don't give up.  I know an awful lot of sites successfully running
news under various flavours of Xenix.


-- 

Ben Broder
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