MKS Homepage v9.1 Patch 1 
Release Notes July 2007

MKS Toolkit is the leader in UNIX to Windows user productivity, platform interoperability, and application portability.

MKS Inc.
 12701 Fair Lakes Circle,
Suite 350
Fairfax VA
22033

Main:
  +1-703-803-3343

Support:
  +1-703-803-7660
  tk_support@mkssoftware.com

www.mkssoftware.com

MKS Toolkit 9.1 Patch 1

MKS Toolkit 9.1 Patch 1 is a maintenance update for MKS Toolkit 9.1. The fixes included in this update are listed in Fixed Problems below. In addition, MKS Toolkit 9.1 Patch 1 introduces many enhancements to support global development and internationalization, current high performance graphics standards and 64-bit platforms and compilers. This patch also introduces major improvements in the Visual Difference utility used in conflict resolution applications. The following sections provide more specifics on some of the items included in this release.

Attention MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers Users:

  • If you are using Wintif, please contact MKS Technical Support before upgrading to MKS Toolkit 9.1 Patch 1.

  • If you are using the MKS Toolkit OpenGL add-on, we recommend that you uninstall this add-on before installing MKS Toolkit 9.1 Patch 1. The standard bundled OpenGL library in this release of MKS Toolkit contains direct rendering capabilities when used with MKS X/Server 8.2. If you plan to continue to use the Hummingbird Exceed X/Server, please reinstall the Add-on after upgrading to MKS Toolkit 9.1 Patch 1 to ensure that the headers, link libraries and redistributable DLLs remain properly installed.

Visual Difference 9.1

The Visual Difference utility (vdiff32) has been updated with the following improvements:

  • Full support for Unicode, UTF-8, ANSI, and OEM character sets including byte order markers.

  • Updated user interface to conform to latest industry standards and technologies.

  • Added support for Most Recently Used/Compared files.

  • Enhanced command line options for diff compatibility.

  • Support for newer peripheral devices such as scroll wheels.

  • Integration with Windows Registry for configuration.

  • Online help now in HTML Help format for Windows Vista compatibility.

High Performance Graphics Support

MKS Toolkit 9.1 Patch 1 features improved support for high performance graphics. Improvements include:

  • The MKS NuTCRACKER Platform, both 32 and 64 bit editions, now supports Open GL Direct Rendering when used with a suitably configured MKS X/Server 8.2. Please see the MKS X/Server 8.2 documentation for instructions.

  • MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers and MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers 64-bit Edition have been updated to include GLX 1.4 client libraries.

Platform and Standards Compliance

Several new features of MKS Toolkit 9.1 Patch 1 are designed to improve compliance with industry standards and platform requirements. These include:

  • The smtpmail utility now supports UTF-8 headers and message bodies.

  • The cc utility now includes full support for x64 and IA64 based compliers.

  • The vi and viw utility now provide enhanced support for international character sets.

  • The printf utility now supports 64-bit integers.

  • Compatibility with Windows Vista has been improved with the inclusion of manifest files in all binaries.

Updated MKS X/Server

MKS Toolkit for Interoperability, MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers, and MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers 64-bit Edition now include the updated MKS X/Server 8.2. The major improvement in the 8.2 release is improved GLX support, including direct rendering. For full details, see the MKS X/Server 8.2 Release Notes.

Note: If you are a MKS Toolkit for Interoperability, MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers, or MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers 64-bit Edition user and downloaded Patch 1 from the MKS web site, please contact MKS Technical Support to obtain a copy of MKS X/Server 8.2.

MKS Toolkit 9.1

MKS Toolkit is the leader in UNIX to Window scripting, connectivity, and application migration. Enhancements found in the 9.1 release include the Enhanced UNIX Compatibility Mode, Windows Vista Support, and the MKS X/Server.

The Fixed Problems section discusses the problems resolved in this release. The following sections discuss the specific enhancements in much greater detail.

Enhanced UNIX Compatibility Mode

MKS Toolkit 9.1 marks the debut of the Enhanced UNIX Compatibility Mode. When this mode is turned on (by setting and exporting the environment variable TK_UNIX_FILESYSTEM), most MKS Toolkit utilities will support a single-rooted virtual file system designed to emulate UNIX file systems in both function and structure. This allows numerous UNIX or Linux scripts to work without modification with MKS Toolkit and provides a more familiar working environment for those used to working on UNIX and Linux systems.

For more information on Enhanced UNIX Compatibility Mode and the associated virtual file system, see the EUCM reference page in the Miscellaneous section of the online MKS Toolkit Utilities Reference. The plain text version of this reference page is available by typing man eucm on the command line.

Virtual /dev Files

MKS Toolkit 9.1 now features the ability to use /dev files similar to those found on UNIX systems. These virtual files map to existing MKS Toolkit capabilities. For example, /dev/stdout is mapped to standard output.

For more information on virtual /dev files, see the dev reference page in the Miscellaneous section of the online MKS Toolkit Utilities Reference. The plain text version of this reference page is available by typing man 5 dev on the command line.

Windows Vista Support

MKS Toolkit 9.1 is compatible with the final release version of the Windows Vista operating system. For more information on making the most out of using MKS Toolkit with Windows Vista, see the Vista reference page in the Miscellaneous section of the online MKS Toolkit Utilities Reference. The plain text version of this reference page is available by typing man vista on the command line.

MKS X/Server

MKS Toolkit for Interoperability, MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers, and MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers 64-bit Edition now include MKS X/Server 8.1 in place of SCO XVision Eclipse. MKS X/Server 8.1 is an updated rebranded version of SCO XVision Eclipse. New and improved features include Secure Shell (SSH) support, IPv6 support, and file compatibility with Hummingbird Exceed. Also, unlike SCO XVision Eclipse, MKS X/Server includes a native 64-bit version for the x64 platform.

More information on MKS X/Server (if installed) can be found in the Documentation sub-menu of the MKS XServer Start menu.

New Features in Previous Releases

Hardware and Software Requirements

MKS Toolkit products do not have any particular hardware requirements. Any machine that is sufficient to run the underlying operating system is sufficient. All MKS Toolkit products run on Windows systems with Intel 32-bit, IA64, or Extended Architecture 64-bit (such as AMD64) processors.

MKS Toolkit products have the following software requirements:

  • Platforms. You can install all MKS Toolkit products on:
    • Windows 2000
    • Windows XP
    • Windows Server 2003
    • Windows Server 2003 R2
    • Windows Vista
    • Windows XP x64 Edition
    • Windows Server 2003 IA64 Edition
    • Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition
    • Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 Edition
    • Windows Vista x64


  • FAT File Systems. It is not currently possible to adequately secure an MKS Toolkit installation on a FAT file system. Therefore, on Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista systems, we recommend installing MKS Toolkit on an NTFS file system.

  • Compilers. The MKS Toolkit development products work with various compilers and compilation environments. The "Using Languages" chapter of the MKS Toolkit UNIX to Windows Porting Guide describes how to use these MKS Toolkit products with C, C++, and Fortran.

    MKS Toolkit for Developers supports the following compilers:
    • Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, 7.0, 7.1, or 8.0 (either as a separate product or as part of Microsoft Visual Studio)
    • Visual C++ 2005 Express (requires Microsoft Platform SDK)
    • Microsoft C++ 2003 Toolkit (requires Microsoft Platform SDK)
    • Intel C++ 8.x or 9.x (requires Microsoft Platform SDK)
    • GCC 3.3.1, as provided in the MKS Toolkit Resource Kit

    In addition, MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers and MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers also support the following compilation environments:
    • both versions of the Standard Template Library
    • the Absoft Pro Fortran f90/f77 compiler, versions 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, and 9.0 (http://www.absoft.com/)

    MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers 64-bit Edition supports the following additional 64-bit compilers:
    • Visual C++ from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
    • Microsoft Platform SDK Compiler
    • Intel C++ 8.x or 9.x (requires Microsoft Platform SDK)

    For those 64-bit compilers that require the Microsoft Platform SDK (that is, the Intel C++ 8.x or 9.x compilers), the version of the SDK required depends upon your system's processor. For those processors with IA64 architecture, you can use any version of the SDK from February 2003 or later, such as the one available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/sdkupdate/. For Extended Architecture processors, you must use Build 1289 or later of the SDK.

    Note: Currently, Absoft does not provide a 64-bit Fortran compiler and associated libraries for the Windows 64-bit platforms. Once this support is available from Absoft, MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers 64-bit Edition will provide Fortran support.

    When installing MKS Toolkit, you are asked to specify the default compiler to be used with the development utilities provided. Should you decide to change your default compiler from your original choice, you should do the following:

    1. Close all MKS Toolkit shells and utilities.

    2. Select Add or Remove Programs from the Windows control panel applet.

    3. Select MKS Toolkit from the list of programs and click the Change button. The MKS Toolkit installer begins.

    4. When the Program Maintenance dialog appears, check the Modify option and click the Next > button.

    5. As the installer continues with the process of modifying your MKS Toolkit configuration, you are given the opportunity to select a new default compiler as well as to change other installer options.

  • Deployment. When deploying NuTCRACKER Platform applications built with Visual Studio 2005, Windows Installer 3.1 (or higher) must be installed on each target machine to ensure that all parts of the NuTCRACKER Platform are installed correctly.

  • Windows Task Scheduler. The MKS Toolkit Scheduler, the command-line scheduling utilities (at, batch, crontab, and wts) require Internet Explorer 4 (or later) and the Windows Task Scheduler. On most Windows operating systems, these are already installed.

    Alternatively, you can download Internet Explorer and its add-ons from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie.

Installing MKS Toolkit

If you have MKS Toolkit 7.5 or earlier, or if you have a previous version of MKS NuTCRACKER Professional, we recommend that you uninstall it, or install MKS Toolkit 9.1 on another machine.

When installing on a machine with SCO XVision Eclipse installed, you should uninstall it before installing MKS Toolkit 9.1.

Note: If you have MKS Toolkit for Interoperability or MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers installed on a Japanese machine and uninstall XVision Eclipse, MKS X/Server is not installed with a standard English license for these products. Contact Customer Support to request the proper license.

When installing MKS Toolkit on a 64-bit machine, you must first uninstall any previously installed MKS Toolkit releases (version 8.6 and earlier).

When installing MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers 64-bit Edition on any platform, you must first uninstall any existing MKS Toolkit installation.

When installing MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers, MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers, or MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers 64-bit Edition, you must install from 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.

All MKS Toolkit products share a common installer. If you are installing from a CD, insert the MKS Toolkit distribution CD; the installer should start automatically. If you are installing from an electronic distribution, run the self-extracting installer.

To install MKS Toolkit, click the Install Toolkit button and follow the instructions on the dialogs that appear.

Note: You should turn off all virus protection software before installing MKS Toolkit. Such software can sometimes cause the installation to be interrupted and rolled back. Once you have installed MKS Toolkit, you can turn virus protection back on.

For step-by-step installation instructions and an installation FAQ, see http://www.mkssoftware.com/support/install.asp.

Silent and Administrative Installations

For step-by-step installation instructions and information on administrative and silent installations for MKS Toolkit see http://www.mkssoftware.com/support/install.asp.

Additional Components on the MKS Toolkit CD

The MKS Toolkit CD also includes several items that are not installed as part of the normal installation procedure. These are:

  • The samples directory. This directory contains a collection of sample source code for use with MKS Toolkit for Professional Developers and MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers. Though they can be modified and compiled for 64-bit Windows systems, these samples were designed and tested on 32-bit Windows platforms using the MKS Toolkit porting and migration products.

    These samples include binaries for cpp, gawk, gmake, install, and the groff suite of utilities.

  • The redist directory. This directory contains a collection of utilities and drivers that may be needed to get full use out of MKS products. This includes the recent versions of the Jet Database driver, Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC), Microsoft Management Console (MMC) and Adobe® Acrobat® Reader.

Uninstalling MKS Toolkit

Uninstalling MKS Toolkit 8.x or 9.x

To uninstall MKS Toolkit, use the following procedure:

  1. From the Control Panel run Add/Remove Programs.

  2. Remove MKS Toolkit 8.x or MKS Toolkit 9.x, as appropriate.

  3. Remove SCO XVision Eclipse (or MKS X/Server). (This is only necessary if one of the two X Server packages was installed. This X Server is normally only installed with MKS Toolkit for Interoperability, MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers, and MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers 64-bit Edition.)

You must reboot your system before reinstalling MKS Toolkit.

Uninstalling Previous Versions of MKS Toolkit

To uninstall a 7.x version of MKS Toolkit, run the TKUninstall utility found in your system directory (you can find your system directory with the windir -s command).

Alternatively, you can uninstall the components manually with the following procedure:

  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.

Known Issues

The following known issues exist in MKS Toolkit 9.1:

  • NuTCRACKER Deployment Wizard on Windows Vista. You cannot run the NuTCRACKER Deployment Wizard on Windows Vista when User Access Protection (UAP) is enabled. However, you can use the command: 
    shexec -v runas AppPkgWz.exe
    to run the wizard unrestricted or you can launch the wizard from an unrestricted shell (as described in the vista reference page in the Miscellaneous section of the online MKS Toolkit Utilities Reference).

  • Installing MKS X/Server. When installing MKS Toolkit for Interoperability or MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers, you may receive a message asking you to uninstall XVision and reboot before you install MKS X/Server. You can install MKS X/Server from the CD autoplay screen. It cannot be installed by performing a Modify or Repair operation on MKS Toolkit.

  • MIT Kerberos for Windows 3.0.0. When MIT Kerberos for Windows 3.0.0 is installed on a system, it appears to break SSPI, causing credential passing errors. We recommend uninstalling this software on systems running MKS Toolkit and rebooting.

  • Security ID Warning. When the TK_NTSECURITYINFO_OFF environment variable is set, it turns off all security related features. This includes the ability to look up user and group IDs. As a result, utilities such as id, chown, and chgrp that depend upon user and group IDs will not work properly when this variable is set.

  • _NutConf(). MKS Toolkit 8.6 added large file support and as a result inadvertently broke backward binary compatibility for applications linked against previous import libraries. With 8.6p2 and 8.7 we added an environment variable to supplement the _NuTConf() to revert the behavior of the runtime to pre-8.6 form such that read beyond a 2G boundary without large file support enabled will not result in an error. set NUT_DISABLE_FULL_LFS_SEMANTICS=1 to do the equivalent of _NutConf(_NC_SET_FULL_LFS_SEMANTICS, FALSE) without the need to recompile or relink your application.

  • Path Name Issue. If you install the Microsoft Platform SDK on a 64-bit machine, and your PATH environment variable contains elements that begin with C:\Program files (x86), the script for setting up the 64-bit build environment included with the platform SDK does not work. There are two possible solutions:

    • Modify the PATH environment variable in the system environment to substitute the short path variant of the folder name Program Files (x86). The short path variant is normally C:\progra~2. You can use dir /x from a command window to be sure.

    • Modify the file setenv.bat in the root directory of the platform SDK tree. Find the section that looks like this: 
              REM ---------------------------------------------
        REM Patch path to put Bin\WinNT\NT4 in path ahead
        REM of NT5 tools that don't run on NT4
        REM ---------------------------------------------
        For /F "delims=;" %%i IN ('Cmd /c Ver') DO (
          IF "%%i"=="Windows NT Version 4.0" (
            Set Path=%MSSdk%\Bin\WinNT\NT4;%Path%
            Goto Finish
          )
        )
        Goto Finish
      and remove or comment out the line that begins Set Path=.

  • The uil Compiler. The uil compiler used with some Motif applications can generate uid files that are compatible with either 32 or 64-bit platforms. A single uid file cannot be used for both situations. This is consistent with the documented behavior of the uil compiler. The uil compiler normally will try to figure out whether to build the 32-bit or 64-bit version based on your build environment. If the TARGET_CPU environment variable is set to either "AMD64" or "IA64", the uil compiler builds a 64-bit compatible uid file; otherwise, it builds a 32-bit compatible uid file. The TARGET_CPU environment variable is set as appropriate for all 64-bit NuTCRACKER build environments launched from the Start menu.

    The uid file that is generated by the uil compiler in this release is not guaranteed to be portable to other 64-bit UNIX platforms.

Customer Support

When reporting a problem, you will need certain information about your product, which you can find on the Support Information tab of the MKS Toolkit Control Panel Applet.

Contact MKS customer support at:

Web Site: http://www.mkssoftware.com/support
Online Request Form: http://www.mkssoftware.com/support/support.asp
E-mail: tk_support@mkssoftware.com
Telephone: +1-703-803-7660
(9:00am to 7:00pm ET, Mon-Fri, except holidays)
Fax: +1-703-803-3344

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:

We have several additional articles, tutorials, and white papers about using features of the MKS Toolkit 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:

Known installation issues are listed at:

Fixed Problems

Several problems were fixed in MKS Toolkit 9.1 Patch 1. These are listed at:

Fixed Problems in Previous Releases

© 2001 - 2007 MKS Software Inc.; in Canada copyright owned by MKS Inc. All rights reserved.