[ale] Porting an application to Linux

[Todd Graham Lewis]

On Sat, 5 Dec 1998, Tory Michael Deron wrote:

> I hope this question isn't too general.  I've been asked to find out
> if there are any gotchas when moving an application from SCO to Linux.

I don't know of any big ones.  

> If you have a large business application, for example, that is run
> in various versions of SCO 5, would running it on a Linux machine be a
> matter of recompiling the source and going to work, or are there other
> considerations of which I need to be aware?  Would programming changes
> be necessary?

Well, you would want to test it after compiling it.  8^)  You might have
to change a few include files, but not too many.  Depending on which system
libraries you use, there might be differences.  E.g., there are two competing
internationalization standards in the unix world, and Linux only supports
one of them.  If SCO supports the other one, and you use i18n, then you
would have to reprogram those parts, or do a compatibility hack.  This is
the same problem you would have porting to Sun, e.g. again.  I know of no
such issues as this wrt SCO.

> I know this may be a potentially involved issue, but any general
> comments would be great for getting me moving in the right direction.

Instead of asking, why don't you buy a RedHat CD, stick it on a PC,
tar over the source code, run `make`, and see what happens?  It's much
easier for us to suggest fixes to your problems _after_ you encounter
them.  8^)  Once you give that a shot, if you have trouble, post back
here and I know that I and others will be more than happy to help you
through it.  You can make it happen with not too much effort.

-- 
Todd Graham Lewis       tlewis at mindspring.net      (800) 719-4664, x2804

"It's still ludicrous that nobody's ever made a run at us by making UNIX
 a popular platform on PCs.  It's almost too late now."  -- Steve Balmer
"It is too late."   -- Bill Gates             _Newsweek_, 6/23/97, p. 82