Re: [foxboro] Unix/Solaris (was RE: Some things to talk about)

Dear Luddite Duc,

Well, I gave up the good fight some time age.  The answer, at least 
as far as we can see, is to turn your windows PC into a Unix 
box.  The newer XP/Server 2000 boxes come with a good enough version 
of the MKS toolkit that you can get decent scripting.  Support for 
awk, sed, perl, ksh and bash are all there.  Foxboro was shipping an 
older (read largely broken)  MKS toolkit / NtCracker Kernel up 
through I/A version 8.1 (I think) and continue to not provide the man 
pages, etc. in an effort to make it harder to transition to 
windows.  (Great work Invensys, way to promote system 
acceptance.)  We already put Cygwin on all of our non I/A platform 
PCs, and it's almost, but not quite exactly like the MKS toolkit 
stuff.  We have managed to move most of our favorite scripts to the 
PC with minimal amounts of tweaking.

Quoting Frits
Foxboro I/A is reverting back to become a closed propriety system.
Simple things we've relied on for years, like CPshell, can not be
re-compiled and made to work for Windows. The libraries, needed to do
so, will not be made available. How many of you use SENDMSG in sequence
blocks to a device that actually is a program or script on your UNIX
box? You can kiss that goodbye alright.
End Quote

I wouldn't call it closed, more like wide open but unsupported.  We 
put UltraEdit on to replace Bpatch and Notepad for instance.
You would think that the libraries would be made available.  I think 
a few of you users out there have made some headway by using the old 
Unix header / library files.  (Once again, great work Invensys, way 
to promote system acceptance.)

Support for DM is gone, and since you guys don't see the benefit of 
upgrading to FoxDraw you're screwed there.  I wonder if you could get 
Peter Martin to help you come up with some metrics to justify the 
"eye candy" (your words, not mine) to your management.  Oh Bottom 
Line Automation where are you?

But I've managed to get most of the P9*s to an acceptable level of 
unixness for my needs.   And they can play awesome video games!
Since all of the new development seems headed towards InFusion / 
Galaxy / WonderDraw,  I expect there to come a time when the MKS 
toolkit will no longer be included either.  And they're 
enhancing/replacing iccdrvr task.  And we won't be able to make .g 
files, and .... It reminds me of the I/A time before the first Sun 
Boxes came out.  But, did I mention they can play awesome video games.

A CS professor I had once said, "You can write FORTRAN in any 
language if you try hard enough."  To paraphrase that, "You can run 
Unix on anything if you try hard enough."

I hope you guys prevail over the forces of darkness, I'm rooting for 
you. But I know that Vista (or even XP SP 3) will improve a lot of 
these things, just ask the guys running controllogix.  Well, maybe not them.

TGIF.
David


 
 
_______________________________________________________________________
This mailing list is neither sponsored nor endorsed by Invensys Process
Systems (formerly The Foxboro Company). Use the info you obtain here at
your own risks. Read http://www.thecassandraproject.org/disclaimer.html
 
foxboro mailing list:             http://www.freelists.org/list/foxboro
to subscribe:         mailto:foxboro-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=join
to unsubscribe:      mailto:foxboro-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=leave

Other related posts: