HP Eloquence Release Notes

Platform Compatibility

This documents summarizes the compatibility between different platforms. The reference platform is HP-UX.

Windows NT/Windows 95

The following compatibility issues needs to be taken care of on the Windows NT / Windows 95 platform:
  1. The Windows platform does not support character oriented programs. So any program which is using FORMs, Softkeys etc. needs to be converted to Dialogs.

  2. QUERY and other utilitiy programs such as CFORM, MFORM and PFORM require character I/O which is not available on Windows NT.

  3. The HP Eloquence servers can not be run on Windows 95.

  4. The Intel processors have a different byte order than PA-RISC processors. This may affect you when you access a packed buffer (eg. DBINFO or DBGET) because HP Eloquence builds them in the order which is native to the underlying system (PACK/UNPACK USING and IN DATA SET takes care of it). However if you unpack buffers manually, you have to take care of the different byte order.

    This may also affect you, when unpacking the DBINFO 202 result buffer. The number of records and data set cpapcity must be unpacked as a 32 bit value (DINTEGER) instead of two 16 bit values.

  5. On HP-UX, the HP-Roman8 character set encoding is usually used (and HP Eloquence internally uses it for backards compatibility). Please be aware, that with Windows the ISO8859-1 character set encoding is usually used. Files written by HP Eloquence may need to be converted if used outside HP Eloquence.

  6. Windows does include POSIX commandline utilities. So any program which depends on the availability of a shell or other tools needs to be converted.

Linux Platform

The Linux Version should be fully compatible to the HP-UX version with the following exceptions:
  1. The eloq program (providing virtual terminals - "TASKS") is currently not available on Linux. The Linux kernel does not support the ioctl() functions we use to communicate with ptys.

  2. There is no Motif Dialog Driver available on Linux. The Linux version is currently limited to forms and ASCII dlg. However, you can use Linux as a server for Windows PCs using graphical dialogs.

  3. The Intel processors have a different byte order than PA-RISC processors. This may affect you when you access a packed buffer (eg. DBINFO or DBGET) because HP Eloquence builds them in the order which is native to the underlying system (PACK/UNPACK USING and IN DATA SET takes care of it). However if you unpack buffers manually, you have to take care of the different byte order.

    This may also affect you, when unpacking the DBINFO 202 result buffer. The number of records and data set cpapcity must be unpacked as a 32 bit value (DINTEGER) instead of two 16 bit values.

  4. On HP-UX, the HP-Roman8 character set encoding is usually used (and HP Eloquence internally uses it for backards compatibility). Please be aware, that with Linux the ISO8859-1 character set encoding is usually used. Files written by HP Eloquence may need to be converted if used outside HP Eloquence. You can use GNU recode to convert character set encoding of files.

  5. The Linux utilities are a different from HP-UX. For example: Linux uses the BSD printing system (lpr) instead of the SYSV one (lp). So any program which uses lp or lpstat directly needs some minor adaption. In addition all modifications which were made to printer interface files must be adapted to lpr filters.

  6. The HP Eloquence terminal adaption of the Linux console does not support underline. This is a limitation of the Linux console driver.

    The following X11 based terminal emulators have been tried:

    The X11 emulator windows currently dont provide a replacement for the "HP Special" keys like Clear-to-End-of-Line or Clear-to-End-of-Display, Insert-Line, Delete-Line.


© Copyright 1998 Hewlett-Packard GmbH. All rights reserved.
Revision: 98/02/16