Tech Note #44: Using Executable Programs
©
1998 Bionic Buffalo Corporation; All Rights Reserved.
1 October 1998
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Bionic Buffalo Tech Note #44:
Using Executable Programs
last revised Thursday 1 October 1998
©1998 Bionic Buffalo Corporation. All rights reserved.
Supported Platforms
Most Bionic Buffalo products are available in “executable” form. We support the following
platforms for most products:
•
Solaris (version 2.6) (Sparc).
•
Linux (Slackware 3.1, including kernel version 2.0) (x86).
•
Windows 95 (any version) and NT (version 4.0) (both x86).
Although we support these specific versions, the software will almost always run on a much
wider range of platforms. This is because we use very few special features of the operating
systems in our code.
For example, the ELF binaries supported for Linux are compatible with those of many other
Unix flavors. We don’t use mechanisms such as System V STREAMS or IPC, which aren’t
always available.
On all platforms for which we support executable code, we use the Berkeley sockets interface
for interprocess communication and networking. Your system must have basic TCP/IP installed
for most of our software to work.
Unless specifically indicated, our user interfaces are based on command lines and are non-
graphical. As explained below, customers can provide their own graphical interfaces and
friendly front ends.
Internally, our software uses the Unicode character set. We translate to and from the host
character set at all OS interfaces. All of our programs support any language configured on the
host platform, including those based on Asian characters.
Application Development
Although our “executable” programs come without sources, you can still write applications
using the APIs they support. We provide libraries, which can be linked with your software, and
which expose the APIs to your software.