Upgrade from Sco Unix 6
 

We have been reading the news showing that Sco is going belly up and filing Chapter 7.

Our company runs Sco Unix for all of our branches and our file systems plus all kinds of customized programs.

My questions is what is the best software to upgrade from Sco Unix. I have heard that Debian could be something or even Redhat. Just need some help deciding on what to move our business too?!?!?!?!

Thanks in Advance.

I think you need to do more thorough investigation than reading a few suggestions on a forum like this. Linux might not be the ideal platform to move to (although some here would argue that Linux is always the best choice). If you're moving to another Unix-like platform there is a host of BSD operating systems, Mac OS X (not to be neglected!), and more.

Do your reading. Do a proper investigation of current and future software (and hardware!) needs. Your "custom" (developed in-house?) software... What are the requirements for it? Can you port it easily? What technical knowledge do you possess in your organization? If you have a ton of FreeBSD admins, moving to FreeBSD would mean less need for training.

...And the list goes on.

Oh, and please ignore posts following this one saying "This-and-this distribution is your best choice".

hw-tph basically said it all.

There are lots of factors that can influence your decision, and you will have to decide which amongst them are going to be the more important ones. The human factor is very important. If you have 100 persons that are trained in sco they will probably be happier if you choose to use any bsd flavor.

But the home-made software can be equally important or even more. If you have a program with over 5 million of source code lines written for sco and relying on libraries and/or features that are not common to sco and linux then you are going to have a hard time porting these so they can be compiled in linux. Your question makes me think that you haven't considered any technical aspect of the migration yet, and that's the first thing you should be doing. All linuxes are equally (non)similar to sco at the core, so, as said above, ignore any post saying "this" or "that" distro is for you.

The first thing you should be clearing is whether linux is suitable at all for you or not.

bsd's are more *nix like than linux, however that might not be a factor if your programs are simple enough or if they have been written with portability in mind.

Most everything custom programed is written in Cobal. I am not a Unix guy by any means. I am the Network Admin for the company, I'm just trying to figure out what would be good for us to go too. I have heard that Sun Solaris could be a good choice.

I guess you meant "cobol".

There are cobol compilers for linux, though I never used one to tell the truth. So that shouldn't be a problem. Still nothing can guarantee that the programs will run flawlessly, sort of trying them yourself in a linux machine.

Network administration can be quite different between linux and other more unix-like oses (bsds, solaris...). Depending on the area we concentrate.

Solaris is an unix flavor, So it's closer to sco than any linux. Yes. it might be a better option. In principle, the closer both oses are, the easier that the migration *should* be.

Thank you guys for your input. Very helpful. You guys ROCK!!

I've used Microfocus Cobol on Linux, and it works fine. However, that doesn't change the fact the code is still in Cobol....:)

Others have said it, and it's true...you need a clear picture of what you're trying to move, and what's the best way to get there. The surest way of being miserable, is to try to rush a migration like this.

Identify the FUNCTIONALITY that needs to be duplicated, and don't focus on the application that provides it. Since it's a big migration task, you'd kill yourself trying to move (for example), an ancient email server, rather than just implementing a new one, with all the same features. Your COBOL app...is there a commercial product that does what you need? You've got flexibility now, and you're not locked into SCO, so that may open doors you've not considered before....

If you want commercial grade support, I know RHEL has that, possibly Suse (Novell) and UBUNTU (LTS version) ?