root@qetzal.UUCP (Admin) (12/15/87)
I'll share some first impressions of the
Dos-Merge 286 product by Microport. Having been in the software
biz for some time, I get too close to the product in a hurry,
and forget to tell the world how easy or
difficult a particular product is to install and learn to use.
UPS brought DosMerge this morning about 10 a.m. Anxious to get
it to work, the shrinkwrap was soon in a pile on the floor.
The manual looks daunting, about two inches of material to read.
Fortunately, the installation chapter is nicely organized into
the following sections: Installing Merge 286, Merge System
Administration, Using Dos from the Unix Shell, Combining DOS
and UNIX, Tailoring the DOS Environment, Installing and
removing Dos Applications, Merge 286 Messages, and an Index.
All in all, a surprisingly user-oriented document.
As opposed to some of the earlier incarnations of the System
V/AT Unix, I was able to follow along and install the
product successfully without a preliminary read-through.
As a practice, I don't suggest doing this, but I had just
backed up all of my filesystems the night before. (The manual
recommends you do that too before installation).
In order to install Dos-Merge, you must already own a copy of
PC-DOS. I used an off-the-shelf copy of IBM DOS 3.2. Dos-Merge
only works with version 3.1 or 3.2 of DOS. In terms of
"Generic Doses," your mileage may vary. I would be hesitant
to be too creative with generic DOSes. Dos-Merge is only
guaranteed to work on an IBM machine with an IBM bios, and a
Televideo machine. I used an IMS clone with Phoenix Bios.
If you have an unusual Bios or an early version of Phoenix,
(earlier than version 2.7), the manual suggests you upgrade.
This product seems to rely very heavily upon the proper operation
of the BIOS, so I suggest their advice be heeded.
Installation is pretty simple. Insert the distribution diskette
and type "installit" when logged in as root. The files are loaded
into the directories /usr/lib/merge and /usr/dbin. A few new files
also appear in /etc, /usr/bin, and /bin. A bourne shell script, /usr
/lib/merge/dosinstall, guides you through installation, and creates
a "snap disk". This snap disk is originally a 1.2 meg diskette
formatted with the dos command, format a: /s. This diskette is
used to build an "image file" from the DOS proprietary software.
The dosinstall shell script installs the kernel in the / directory,
and renames your old kernel to unix.premerge. You then reboot the
machine OFF THE FLOPPY to complete installation. Reboot the machine
once more off the hard disk, and installation is complete.
Fortunately this shell script handles floppy read failures. Because
of a bug in the 2.3 release, accesses to the floppy drive don't
always succeed, and indeed it failed a couple of times on my machine.
The shell script told me of the failure, and I pushed "retry" until
the installation finally succeeded.
I ordinarily run my IMS at 10 mhz. Unfortunately, Dos-Merge cannot
handle higher speeds, and double panics occur. This is something
of a disappointment, but at least this limitation is documented
in the release notes. Another negative - DOS does not seem to
work from a remote terminal, but haven't tried the "CTTY" command
yet. The traditional _ cursor is now reserved for DOS, and a
non-blinking block cursor is used for Unix. If you like block
cursors, I suppose it's ok, but I think it should be an option.
On the bright side, the implementation seems quite seamless. I
was surprised that my Logimouse driver worked, even more surprised
that Microsoft windows worked, and absolutely astounded that
Procomm worked. I am very impressed that I don't have to repartition
my disks - all of the DOS files are loaded directly from the
unix file system! You can, however, create a dos partition to use that
primordial software that still requires a key disk if necessary.
Accessing dos is trivial - you just type "dos". If you want to
allocate a system resource, say com1 for example, you type
"dos +acom1" and that resource becomes available to DOS.
Apparently this is how the contention of resources issues is
resolved in Dos-Merge.
Well, that's about all there was too it. Installation of this
product was the simplest thing I've ever done on Microport, and
I have battled lots of hardware and software. As a salesman type,
I'm looking forward to keeping my records in a database such as
dbase III. I've always used Unix, and am glad I held out for
this product. I'll keep you posted (:-).
{
Robert White
}
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