
SCO UNIX was the successor to the Santa Cruz Operation‘s variant of Microsoft Xenix, derived from UNIX System V Release 3.2 with an infusion of Xenix device drivers and utilities. SCO UNIX System V/386 Release 3.2.0 was released in 1989, as the commercial successor to SCO Xenix. The base operating system did not include TCP/IP networking or X Window System graphics; these were available as optional extra-cost add-on packages. Shortly after the release of this bare OS, SCO shipped an integrated product under the name of SCO Open Desktop, or ODT. 1994 saw the release of SCO MPX, an add-on SMP package.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenServer
Having no suitable hardware, I will use VirtualBox to emulate a machine with very basic characteristics:
- OS: Other/Unknown, 32bit
- HDD: 512MB
- RAM: 64MB
- Network: PCnet-PCI II
Installation procedure
Installation is quite a straightforward but, probably a little annoying procedure due to the large number of diskettes that have to be inserted. Luckily, in the virtual environment, there is no need to do everything physically:
- Create a VirtualBox guest machine with the above shown characteristics
- Grab the OS distribution here: https://winworldpc.com/download/41c2b04d-2d18-c39a-11c3-a4e284a2c3a5 and extract files from 7-zip archive.
- There is a file serial.txt with serial number/code – Sn: SOT552746, Ak: kqpzdsso which is for SCO Open Desktop Release 3.0
- Distribution missed N1 boot disk. Grab it from SCO FTP server: ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/SLS/uod383bon1.Z, don’t mix it with the other boot disk which is for SCO UNIX OS: uod383bun1.Z. Uncompress the boot disk image and rename it just to look nicer:
$ uncompress uod383bon1.Z $ mv uod383bon1 uod383bon1.img
- Insert the uod383bon1.img into the virtual floppy drive and pedantically follow the installation instructions, by inserting and sometimes re-inserting all the 40+ diskettes into the virtual floppy drive.
- Download, uncompress and install all the necessary Advanced Hardware Supplement (AHS) for the new drivers: ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/AHS/3.0/sco/3.4/135/
- Download, uncompress and install all the necessary Support Level Supplements (SLS) to update OS and drivers: ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/SLS/
- To enable network in our minimal configuration install ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/AHS/3.0/sco/3.4/135/lli.Z and ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/SLS/net387a.Z to configure AMD Pcnet-PCI LAN driver
Hints
- Use Keyboard Mouse for the pointing device.
- If you selected wrong mouse during installation, you probably unable to use X-window. Press Alt-F1 to switch to the first virtual terminal. Login as root and execute:
# mkdev mouse
to configure the mouse, rebuild kernel for the new device and update configs.
- AHS/SLS directories contain *.ltr and *.doc files documenting installation procedure for each of the update bundle.