Unpacking of SCO boot media

[ArtiomWin]

Hello. Please help me with unpacking of SCO boot disks available here (and particulary 'uod429a.Z' for Open Desktop 3.0): http://www.lubkin.com/SCO/boot-media.html
When I tried to unpack on Unixware 7, it gives an error "Not in compressed format".

[Kenneth]

Code: Select all

$ curl -O ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/SLS/xnx264.n1.Z
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  277k  100  277k    0     0   535k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  534k
$ uncompress xnx264.n1.Z 
$ ls -l xnx264.n1 
-rw-r--r--  1 root  staff  737280 Sep  7 19:35 xnx264.n1
$ man compress | head

COMPRESS(1)               BSD General Commands Manual              COMPRESS(1)

NAME
     compress, uncompress -- compress and expand data

SYNOPSIS
     compress [-fv] [-b bits] [file ...]
     compress -c [-b bits] [file ...]
     uncompress [-fv] [file ...]

BSD compress(1) and uncompress(1) should do the trick.

[ArtiomWin]

Code: Select all

$ curl -O ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/SLS/xnx264.n1.Z
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  277k  100  277k    0     0   535k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  534k
$ uncompress xnx264.n1.Z 
$ ls -l xnx264.n1 
-rw-r--r--  1 root  staff  737280 Sep  7 19:35 xnx264.n1
$ man compress | head

COMPRESS(1)               BSD General Commands Manual              COMPRESS(1)

NAME
     compress, uncompress -- compress and expand data

SYNOPSIS
     compress [-fv] [-b bits] [file ...]
     compress -c [-b bits] [file ...]
     uncompress [-fv] [file ...]

BSD compress(1) and uncompress(1) should do the trick.

Not every archive there can be uncompressed with BSD compress. My attempt of following your advice was looked like this:

Code: Select all

# uncompress uod429a.Z
uncompress: uod429a.Z: Inappropriate file type or format 

I think you should try on some SCO/Xinuos system (Unixware or OpenServer) since it might be compressed with SCO 'compress -H'.

[Kenneth]

Regular old gzip 1.9 worked for me...

Code: Select all

$ /usr/local/Cellar/gzip/1.9/bin/gunzip uod429a.Z 
$ file uod429a 
uod429a: data
$ ls -l uod429a 
-rw-r--r--  1 root  staff  1474560 Sep  8 16:27 uod429a

[ArtiomWin]

Regular old gzip 1.9 worked for me...

Code: Select all

$ /usr/local/Cellar/gzip/1.9/bin/gunzip uod429a.Z 
$ file uod429a 
uod429a: data
$ ls -l uod429a 
-rw-r--r--  1 root  staff  1474560 Sep  8 16:27 uod429a

Once again it's failed (I've tried it this time on TrueOS 18.03):

Code: Select all

# gunzip uod429a.Z
gunzip: uod429a.Z: not in gzip format

[valvedubstep]

gunzip worked fine here.

[ArtiomWin]

Thank you everybody. Now I've successfully unpacked uod429a.Z on Fedora and now can test SCO Open Desktop 3.0 (CD-ROM without boot floppy is available on FTP). It looks like gzip works differently on Linux and BSD.

[DailyGerald]

It could be interesting to see if there is something different about the archive format that is making it behave that way. If you ran the "file" command on the archive on a modern Linux system, does it report back something unexpected?