MKS Toolkit Release Notes
Version 7.0.1

MKS Software Inc.
12701 Fair Lakes Circle, Suite 350
Fairfax VA 22033-3831 USA
Support: +1-703-803-7660
+1-703-803-3343
http://www.mks.com/interop

October 2000

Contents
MKS Toolkit 7.0.1
Introducing Toolkit 7.0
Hardware and Software Requirements
Installing Your MKS Toolkit Product
Uninstalling Your MKS Toolkit Product
New Features in Toolkit 7.0
Clarifications
Customer Support
Additional MKS Toolkit Resources
Problems Fixed in MKS Toolkit Release 7.0.1
Problems Fixed in MKS Toolkit 7.0 Patch 1
Problems Fixed in MKS Toolkit Release 7.0

MKS Toolkit 7.0.1
MKS Toolkit 7.0.1 is an updated version of MKS Toolkit 7.0 with the following improvements:

• Updated reference pages are included.
  
  
• MKS Toolkit for System Administrators and all higher products now include the remote services and related utilities (rshd, rexecd, rsetup, rconfig, and grconfig).
  
  
• Fixes from MKS Toolkit 7.0 Patch 1 are included.
  
  
• Additional fixes are included.
  

Introducing MKS Toolkit 7.0
MKS Toolkit 7.0 is the result of merging our MKS Toolkit 6.x and MKS NuTCRACKER Professional 4.x products, along with the addition of several new features. In addition, the award-winning MKS Toolkit general-purpose product has become five different products, each designed to serve the needs of a different user community.

The MKS Toolkit products are as follows, in order of fewest features to most features. With minor exceptions, each subsequent product contains all the features of its predecessor.

• MKS Toolkit for System Administrators -- a powerful administration suite that lets you move data and files between machines, remotely administer systems, and perform UNIX-compatible backups, across UNIX, Linux, and Windows platforms.
  
  
• MKS Toolkit for Developers -- a Windows development product for software, script, and Web developers, who can choose from UNIX-style command line or graphical VisualStudio® build environments. This product replaces the former MKS Toolkit 6.x product.
  
  
• MKS Toolkit for Interoperability -- a full UNIX and Windows interoperability suite, allowing remote access, remote system administration, interconnectivity, file sharing, and full automation and scripting capabilities. This product replaces the former MKS Toolkit Select product.
  
  
• MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers -- an ideal solution for extending the MKS Toolkit product family which allows you to migrate custom tools and scripts from UNIX/Linux to Windows.
  
  
• MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers -- a complete solution for integrating UNIX and Windows software development on a single developer system, solving both interoperability and cross-platform development needs; for migrating complex, graphical UNIX and Linux applications and scripts to Windows; and for evolving and modernizing those applications to take advantage of Windows, to integrate with Windows applications, and to become web-enabled. This product replaces the former MKS NuTCRACKER Professional product.

For convenience, the following abbreviations are used in these release notes:

TKSA -- MKS Toolkit for System Administrators
TKDev -- MKS Toolkit for Developers
TKIO -- MKS Toolkit for Interoperability
TKPDev -- MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers
TKEDev -- MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers

The following table summarizes the features available in each of the MKS Toolkit products.

For more information about the specific contents and features of each product, refer to the MKS Toolkit Product Overview and Solutions Guide, included with your MKS Toolkit product in both hardcopy and on-line versions.

Hardware and Software Requirements
MKS Toolkit products run only on Windows on Intel 32-bit processors.

All MKS Toolkit products will install on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0 (Workstation, Server, or Terminal Server) with Service Pack 4+, and Windows 2000 (Professional, Server, or Advanced Server). Applications migrated with either MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers or for Enterprise Developers will run on any of these platforms.

There are limitations for Windows 95 and Windows 98. Many MKS Toolkit utilities are Windows NT- or Windows 2000-specific. These are clearly documented on the reference pages. Additionally, the SLNet Telnet Server (provided in MKS Toolkit for Interoperability and MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers) only runs on Windows NT/2000. In addition, because of the lack of certain OS features on Windows 95 and Windows 98, certain of the MKS Toolkit UNIX APIs run in degraded mode (or return without doing anything) on those platforms. These are discussed in the MKS Toolkit Cross-Platform Developer's Guide and in great detail in the documentation for each API.

The development products work with Microsoft Visual C++ versions 5.0 and 6.0. Both MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers and for Enterprise Developers support both versions of the Standard Template Library. In addition, they both support the Absoft Pro Fortran f90/f77 compiler, versions 5.0 and 6.0 (http://www.absoft.com/).

The typical disk space requirements are:

MKS Toolkit products do not have any particular hardware requirements. Any machine that is sufficient to run the underlying operating system is sufficient to run any MKS Toolkit product.

Installing Your MKS Toolkit Product
Note: To install either MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers or for Enterprise Developers, you must have Microsoft Visual C/C++ (version 5.0 or later) already installed on your system.

Note: Installing either MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers or for Enterprise Developers on Windows NT or Windows 2000 requires an account with local or domain administrator privileges. You do not need to be an Administrator, but your login ID must be a member of the local or domain Windows Administrators group before you can install.

Note: We recommend that you uninstall any previous version of MKS Toolkit before installing MKS Toolkit 7.0. If you have a previous version of MKS NuTCRACKER Professional, we recommend that you either uninstall it, or install MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers on another machine.

All MKS Toolkit products have an integrated installer. To install your product:

• If you are installing from a CD, insert the MKS Toolkit distribution CD; the installer should start automatically. Click the Install button. If you are installing from an electronic distribution, run the self-extracting installer. Click on the Install button.
  
  
• If the installer does not start automatically, run the setup.exe installation program from the main directory of the distribution.
  
  
• Enter your serial number in the Serial No field.
  
  
• Select one of the installation options -- Compact, Typical, Custom, or NuTCRACKER Workstation Only. The Compact and Typical options are defined separately for each MKS Toolkit product. The Custom option lets you select the various components included in MKS Toolkit product you have purchased. (The NuTCRACKER Workstation Only option is for installing the runtime to support an application migrated with one of the MKS Toolkit migration products. This is not an option to choose for an initial installation.)
  
  
• In the Setup Type and Target Directory dialog box, the installer displays a default installation directory in the Installation Root Drive/Directory field. If you want to install in a different directory, use the Browse button to select that directory.
  
  
• If you are installing MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers, you must next select either the standard Motif library or the Wintif library, which provides the user with a runtime choice of either a Motif or a Windows look-and-feel.
  
  
• If your MKS Toolkit product includes an X server, the Select X Server(s) to Install dialog will appear. You can install any or all (or none) of the X servers. If you choose an X server, a Select Root Directory dialog will appear for each server. Select a directory into which to install the server or accept the default directory.

  Notes: Depending on the product, you may not have a choice of servers. You may not install both English and Japanese X servers on the same machine.

  You will then have the choice of selecting an X server to start at system startup.
  
  

• If your MKS Toolkit product includes telnet and NFS capabilities, you will be asked for an installation directory for each.
  
  
• You may then select the Start menu folder where the MKS Toolkit will appear. The default folder is MKS Toolkit.

Uninstalling Your MKS Toolkit Product
To uninstall MKS Toolkit:

1. From the control panel, run Add/Remove Programs.
   
2. Remove, in order, each of the following (if present):

   MKS Evaluation Guide
   MKS Toolkit 7.x
   MKS Platform Components 7.x

You must reboot your system before reinstalling MKS Toolkit.

New Features in MKS Toolkit 7.0
The primary new features in MKS Toolkit 7.0 are:

• Documents in PDF. With MKS Toolkit 7.0, we are moving as many documents as possible to portable formats, such as PDF and HTML, rather than proprietary formats, so that you can read them from UNIX or Windows. Reading a PDF document requires a copy of Acrobat Reader, available from Adobe, http://www.adobe.com/.
  
  
• New Help Files. For reference pages, while we still provide ASCII text versions via the man command, we are concentrating on HTML Help versions, available via the Start menu. To read these files, you will need Internet Explorer 4.0 or later installed, but it does not have to be your default browser.
  
  
• Product Overview and Solutions Guide. Each MKS Toolkit includes both a hard copy and an on-line copy of this new guide, designed to help you understand the potential of the product that you have bought.
  
  
• Evaluation Guide. Unless you explicitly choose a minimal installation or choose not to install the Evaluation Guide, a copy of the guide and a series of examples, demonstrations, and tutorials are installed with each MKS Toolkit Product. It will be well worth a few minutes of your time to review this material, because it demonstrates many novel ways to use your MKS Toolkit product to solve real-world problems.
  
  
• Mounted File System Support. MKS Toolkit for System Administrators and all higher products include both mount and umount commands, for mounting and unmounting file systems. MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers and MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers now include the equivalent API-level support: mount() and umount().
  
  
• Remote Utilities. MKS Toolkit for System Administrators and all higher products include utilities for accessing remote machines, including rcp, remote file copy; rsh, remote shell; rexec, remote execution; and rlogin, remote login. These utilities are compatible with standard UNIX rshd and rexecd daemons.

  Note: In the past, the utility called rsh behaved as a restricted shell. Because of the new rsh (remote shell) command, we moved the restricted shell to resh.
  

• Remote Services. MKS Toolkit for System Administrators and all higher products also include the server-side components for these utilities: rshd, and rexecd. Included with these services are the support utilities rsetup, to set up LSA database entries of user name/password combinations for the rshd service; rconfig, to configure the rshd and rexecd services; and grconfig, a graphical version of rconfig.
  
  
• Symbolic Links. On Windows 2000, all MKS Toolkit commands now understand symbolic links. Symbolic links can only be created on Windows 2000, on an NTFS-5 file system, on a local disk (not a network drive), and can only link to directories. Hard links can still link to files. For example, ln -s creates symbolic links, ls and lc display symbolic links in a manner that UNIX users expect, and find has the -follow option to follow symbolic links.

  MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers and MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers now include the equivalent API-level support: lchown() and lstat(). In addition, the symlink(), readlink(), chown(), and stat() APIs have been updated and behave according to the UNIX98 specification.

  Note: If you delete a symbolic link from Windows Explorer using the DEL key, the link file i

  ent to the Recycle Bin. If you delete the symbolic link with SHIFT-DEL, Windows Explorer not only deletes the link file, but it also deletes the directory that is the target of the link (including any subdirectories). Using the command line DEL command deletes the link and all files in the target directory, except subdirectories.
  
  

• GNU Make. MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers and MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers now include the gmake command for improved interoperability of your UNIX and Windows makefiles and build process.
  
  
• Lex and Yacc. MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers now includes System-V compatible versions of the lex and yacc scanner and parser generating tools allowing you to automate complex processes like user input translation and compiler construction.
  
  
• Upgrade to viw. The viw editor has undergone a significant upgrade:
  • When running shell commands in viw (for example, :!ls), it now uses sh -w to display information from the shell command. If your SHELL environment variable is set to $ROOTDIR/mksnt/sh.exe, you should set the viw option shellopt to include the -w. The default value for shellopt is -c, so you should change it to -wc (:set shellopt -wc).
  • The viw editor now features improved handling of the standard error stream from failed shell commands.
  • The new viw option noguierror keeps the editor from displaying a dialog box when an error occurs. When this option is set, error messages are displayed on the status bar.
  • In viw, you can now set text and window colors via Options->Text.
  • You can save and load multiple profiles in viw with the -n prof_name option. Each profile saves the color scheme, recently used files, ex commands, font size, position, and File Open filter independently from the default and other profiles. When you specify -n prof_name, if a profile of that name exists, it will be loaded. If it does not exist, the default profile is loaded, and any changes made during the session will be saved in a new profile of that name. For example, you may want one profile for HTML files and another for your C files. To create (and later load) these profiles, use command lines such as viw -n html file.htm and viw -n c file.c.
    
    
• Miscellaneous Changes.
  • The way that the KornShell handles passing quoted arguments to non-MKS programs has been improved. Existing shell scripts should not require any changes, except in the rare cases where customers needed to work around the deficiencies of the older method.
  • The KornShell, sh, now has a -w option that causes the shell to display "[Hit return to continue]" on the console, and to wait before exiting.
  • The vi editor has the visualbell option to allow a visual bell in place of or in addition to an audio bell (:set visualbell).
  • The web utility now has a timeout, specified with the -t option.
  • The man utility now can display HTML Help reference pages as well as ASCII text pages. See the man reference page for details.

Clarifications
The following items require additional clarification:

• NuTCRACKER Platform Version Numbers. The NuTCRACKER Platform included with MKS Toolkit 7.0 is called NuTCRACKER 4.3 in some contexts. In particular when you use the filever utility on executable programs and DLLs included in the NuTCRACKER Platform, you will see results like:

>filever nutsys4.dll
nutsys4.dll: NuTCRCACKER system call library, version 4.30.0000

Additionally, because NuTCRACKER Workstation is now part of the MKS Toolkit, the NuTCRACKER control panel applet is now installed with all members of the MKS Toolkit product family. Selecting File Versions in the Category combo box lists the file versions of programs included in the NuTCRACKER Platform. If you have installed MKS Toolkit for System Administrators, MKS Toolkit for Developers, or MKS Toolkit for Interoperability, the displayed list includes entries for the two files, apppkgwz.exe and nutins.dll, marked with red exclamation points to indicate that version information for these files could not be found. These two files are not installed by the listed members of the MKS Toolkit product family, and this error report can be safely ignored.

• SLnet Telnet Server. MKS Toolkit for Interoperability and MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers include the SLnet Telnet Server. By default, accounts for this telnet server use the MKS KornShell (sh) as the shell. To change a SLNet account to use cmd.exe as the command interpreter:

  1. Start the SLNet control panel applet.
  2. Select the Users tab.
  3. Either select the account ot update and click Edit, or click New.
  4. Set the Default Shell text box to %systemroot%\system32\cmd.exe.
  5. Set the Startup Directory text box to an appropriate value (for example, C:\ or %HOME%)
  6. Clear the contents of the Command Line text box.
  7. Click OK.

Customer Support
To receive support for your MKS Toolkit product, you must buy a Preferred Customer Support (PCS) contract. Many products come bundled with PCS. For others, PCS is optional. PCS is renewable annually for a small fee and entitles you to unlimited customer support, patches, bug fixes, and all product upgrades for the duration of the contract. In any given 12-month period, MKS typically releases one minor upgrade (maintenance), one major upgrade (new features), and several patches, none of which you will want to miss.

In addition, customers with PCS may elect to receive periodic mailings from our customer support organization. These mailings--geared at end users--outline new features, give tips for using features, discuss how to solve common problems, and provide other frequently requested information. Moreover, as MKS moves more of its internal support information onto the support web site, only those customers with PCS will be able to access this controlled information, that will include instant status about reported issues, a searchable database of frequently asked questions, and much more detailed self-help information.

If you are a new customer or you have never activated your PCS account, you must register with our customer support organization. Registration--mandatory before you can receive support--is simple. The easiest way to register is by filling out the registration form during product installation, or you may do so at any time over the web at http://www.mks.com/interop/register. And please be assured that this information is used for no other purpose than to provide support to you. Your personal information will not be given to anyone else.

Without PCS, you will not be entitled to any support, patches, bug fixes, upgrades, mailings, or self-help information. If you do not have PCS, all of our sales channels offer MKS Toolkit products with bundled PCS for your convenience. If you already have product, but need PCS, you may purchase a PCS contract by contacting MKS directly at 800-637-8034 or +1-703-803-3343.

With PCS, you can request customer support by contacting us using one of the means listed below and in your request, include the name and version number of the product that you are using, your serial number, and the operating system and version/patch level that you are using. Contact MKS customer support at:

Additional MKS Toolkit Resources
There are several other sources for additional information about our MKS Toolkit products.

We have general product information, including technical specifications, detailed utility listings, and datasheets at:

We offer a resource kit including example scripts, additional utilities, more tutorials, and a wide variety of other useful information at:

Through the years, we have accumulated a lot of technical details about the MKS Toolkit products and have put this information in a searchable database at:

Our customers commonly ask certain questions. These questions and their answers are in our Frequently Asked Questions pages at:

Problems Fixed in MKS Toolkit 7.0.1 Release
The following table documents issues that were fixed in the MKS Toolkit 7.0.1 release.

Problems Fixed in MKS Toolkit 7.0 Patch 1
The following table documents issues that were fixed in the MKS Toolkit 7.0 Patch 1 release.

Problems Fixed in MKS Toolkit 7.0 Release
The following table documents issues that were fixed in the MKS Toolkit 7.0 release.