Recently I’ve taken it upon myself to update the sourceforge pages for SIMH. In the process of building platform EXE’s for people and whatnot, I’ve decided to try to make some of the more popular Operating Systems easier to use for the Windows users.
From what I’ve seen of the downloads the Windows users are the largest group, then followed by OSX. I’ve actually seen 2x more downloads for NeXTSTEP than Linux/i386… But I suspect it’s an advertising thing if anything else.
So inorder to make 4.2BSD more accessable to the end user I have spent a day with NSIS, and created an install package.
You can now download 4.2BSD in an easy to use EXE here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=204974&package_id=245145&release_id=538195
As I write this the current version is listed as v0.1a . I fixed a few annoying bugs, however I wanted to push out a release before I went to sleep.
What I have tried to do here, is seperate the user data, from the Operating System. By doing this a novice can quickly repair the OS, but re-installing the os component from a windows installer. Currently this NSIS script doesn’t support repairs, so to do it cleanly you must uninstall 4.2BSD, doing so will give you the options of preserving your OS & Home disks. If the OS is trashed, simply allow it to remove the OS, but retain the home disk. Then re-install the application, and uncheck the home disk. This will preserve the one in place.
I’ve also included a copy of putty to give a better tty experence to the end user. I’m thinking about changing this so that the console is brought up with putty.
At any rate, if anyone thinks something along these lines is a good tool, let me know!
