NetBSD 0.8

Posted on December 2, 2010 by neozeed

Thanks to Bert Kiers, the source to NetBSD 0.8 has been located!

Currently it resides at http://netbsd.itsx.net/netbsd-0.8-src.tgz

I haven’t tried to build it yet, but I would imagine that it should be possible from either 386 BSD 0.1 with all the patchkits installed, or maybe from within NetBSD 0.9 …

I don’t know if the install diskettes are easily generated… So this may be a source up/down grade depending on how you look at it.

But this is a ‘good thing’ as this would be the last ‘lost’ version of NetBSD. Then I can tackle 386 BSD 0.0 & FreeBSD.

NetBSD 0.9

Posted on December 1, 2010 by neozeed

Well by some strange google search I actually found a site in Russia that had NetBSD 0.9 for the i386! Wasting no time, I mirrored the site on my VPS, then spent some time late last night trying to figure out how to boot this thing, but to no avail. Qemu, Virtual BOX and Virtual PC, could not boot the disk images correctly, while BOCHS was running into all kinds of errors related to the 0.9 kernel’s floppy, and hard disk errors with 1.0’s handling of the hard disk.

So for the heck of it, I tried it on VMWare Fusion for OS X, and lo, it booted the NetBSD 0.9 kernel floppy! So I went ahead, and made all the diskettes for the release, and went ahead and installed it on VMWare. Now while VMWare may be able to install NetBSD, it doesn’t emulate peripherals like NE2000’s so networking would involve PPP or SLIP over the COM port, which sounds like a lot of work, looking back to my adventure with SLIP a while back, that I’m not looking to redo anytime soon.

So with my installed VMDK (the disk file VMWare uses), I used the qemu utility qemu-img to convert it to a compressed qcow2 image, then booted up Qemu with the image.

And it worked!

So with that in hand, I rebuilt Qemu to remove the NE2000 on 0x300/IRQ 9, and then rebuilt the NetBSD kernel to remove all the devices I don’t need/care about (SCSI,NFS,MATH EMULATION,etc..) and reconfigured the NE2000 to be on 0x320 IRQ 10, to match Qemu, and then ran the whole thing together, configured the network, and it seemed to be working fine.

From there it was a matter of transferring the disk image back to VMWare, I copied in the source code for lynx and ircII-4.4 then transfered it back to Qemu. And yes they worked as expected!

The only thing remaining in my flight of adventure was to build f2c, and see if it’d run Dungeon.

Yes it runs Dungeon!

So with all of that out of the way, for anyone that wants to run it, I’ve uploaded my work on my sourceforge project page.

Now I just need to find myself a copy of NetBSD 0.8, and spend some more time with 386 BSD 0.0 & the hard disk parameters to see if I can get that to cleanly install.

In the meantime, feel free to load up NetBSD 0.9, fire up irc and say hi.

Downloads of my BSD on Windows..

Posted on November 30, 2010 by neozeed

I just noticed that sourceforge is making changes to their downloads, so it’ll probably break a tonne of my stuff on this blog (and other places)… but look at the nice picture!

1. United States 913
2. China 321
3. Hungary 152
4. United Kingdom 111
5. Germany 73
6. Canada 36
7. Russia 36
8. Argentina 26
9. Japan 22
10. Greece 16

Which is interesting… well to me anyways. I wonder if it’s more representative of internet penetration, or language barrier?

NetBSD 1.2 & the MicroVAX II

Posted on November 30, 2010 by neozeed

So I’ve been working on some instructions to install the first NetBSD I could find that would run on SIMH’s MicroVAX II… Think of it as a lineage continuation from the 4.3 BSD to the Net/2. Anyways the 1.2 install proved to be.. .difficult to say the least, however once it’s installed I found a weird snag, that NetBSD 1.2 doesn’t seem to have curses…. And I though curses was one of those things that made any BSD a BSD.

I haven’t put together an install just yet, I figure I’ll have to download ncurses over, and build with that but I just don’t have the time today, so I’m leaving things where they are for now. Although I did manage to get a bunch more other stuff built, which I’ve posted package tapes on my sourceforge page here. And if anyone is that motivated they can always follow the above instructions, and install their own NetBSD 1.2 VAX, although I’m not holding my breath.. lol

Also I noticed that NetBSD 1.2 doesn’t have any fortran, so I built f2c, and managed to get dungeon running. woo!

Yep, it runs Dungeon!

Oh well it’s all good fun from 1996.

Your submission has been rejected by our reviewers. Please read the notes below regarding your submission:

Posted on November 26, 2010 by neozeed

Reviewer Notes: REJECTED – Issues with plug-in
There appears to be an issue with the plug-in not working with local speex files once an http version is played and shows a messagebox of ‘Speex Error’ – ‘Not a Speex stream’. Restarting Winamp will then play the local file but am sure this shouldn’t be happening. Please fix and then re-submit the fixed version.

Don’t you hate it when you focus so much on the big things you forget the small stuff, like switching between local and remote?

Sigh.

Thankfully the fix was trivial, and only involved one line of code… I spent more time re-building a VM with Visual C++ 4.2 then I did fixing the code & recompiling…

Naturally the download is on the sourceforge page, and I bumped the version to 0.76a … If anyone ever wonders years from now what the deal was… lol

Net Hack wiki moved

Posted on November 21, 2010 by neozeed

I just received notice that the NetHack wiki has now moved and the new site is nethackwiki.com.

It’s great when old software just doesn’t revive for a little while then fade back to obscurity, so update your links, or just browse the site and be blown away by all their information on such a great (and difficult) game.

And of course, I have NetHack for the Windows NT 4.0 MIPS, and various 4.X BSD on sourceforge under the package tapes….

Qemu compression & encryption

Posted on November 19, 2010 by neozeed

Well after I gave up on one VPS I’ve had for a long time, I picked up a handful of $5 ones world wide… Some in nations I’ve been to, and others.. I’m not so sure I trust at all..

Which really calls into question just how much can you trust on the internet, esp when it’s data you can’t or seemingly don’t encrypt.. This is where Qemu’s qcow format can step in and provide either…

Or simply you are on a particular VPS, and you want to run something completely different, but you don’t want to be short of disk space.

From what I’ve found with qemu it’s quite easy, with only one snag for the whole thing. That being no matter if you decide to Compress or Encrypt, you can only CONVERT a disk into this schema, not create one.

So if you have an existing disk image, it’s a snap, otherwise, it’s a 2 step process that I’m sure is here for a good reason. Anyways the process for both goes like this:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 template.disk 2G
Formatting ‘template.disk’, fmt=qcow2 size=2147483648 encryption=off cluster_size=0

qemu-img convert template.disk -O qcow2 compressed.disk -c

qemu-img convert template.disk -O qcow2 encrypted.disk -e
Disk image ‘encrypted.disk’ is encrypted.
Password: password

Which naturally first creates a 2GB ‘template’ disk, which then we create a compressed disk, and an encrypted disk image. And it is here were the encryption will ask you for a password… Sadly it doesn’t verify your input, so make sure you type it in correctly. Thankfully the original isn’t destroyed so if you screw it up you can encrypt it again……

So now mounting the compressed disk is no different then before, however the encrypted will need a password, passed to the qemu monitor…

Now you may want to run this behind something like screen if you are on any *NIX or telnet into yourself if you are on windows to shove the service in the background to not rely on a console… So I’ve worked up this:

qemu -L pc-bios -hda encrypted.disk -monitor telnet:127.0.0.1:23,server

And for UNIX people who can run it interactivly because their stdio driver isn’t broken..

qemu -L pc-bios -hda encrypted.disk -monitor stdio

Now when you start either one, Qemu will start paused, and you must continue, then enter the disks password (if you have more then one disk, it’ll pause and ask for each disk!), then it’ll execute.

QEMU 0.11.1 monitor – type ‘help’ for more information
(qemu) c
ide0-hd0 (encrypted.disk) is encrypted.
Password: ********
(qemu)

And away you go… From what I understand qemu uses zlib for the compression, and AES for the encryption… Which for free is snazzy, so enjoy!

For anyone shopping around for a VPS

Posted on November 18, 2010 by neozeed

check out this incredible site, lowendbox.com. I was thinking of having a cheap backup site for some of my stuff in my own cloud (thanks google!) and we aren’t talking any major investment here… And for the added sake of paranoia they even review and list places in the UK and heck Egypt at a glance…

And of course the tags make it nice to jump around to see nations, hosting types etc etc….

And check the prices, you can actually find some VPS’s for around $2.50 USD a month!!! (on a month to month basis!!).

I’m kind of glad in retrospect to have not really gotten into this business it is way too cut throuat.

Building 32bit binaries on x86_64 Debian 7 / Wheezy

Posted on November 16, 2010 by neozeed

I’ve been going in circles with slirp trying to really get it to run on x86_64 mode so far to no availâ€¦

So first thing, hello from the future of 2020 (I wrote this quick blurb in 2010), and Wheezy has been pulled from the main mirrors. So annoying! You need to update your apt sources to use the archive:

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main
deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib

Do your apt-get update;apt-get upgrade and you’ll be ready to roll!

But it’d sure help to be able to compile code in 32bit/64bit on the same machine. Anyways after looking for far too long I managed to find that it’s really simple.

apt-get install lib32bz2-dev

And away we go!

Naturally, you’ll need a compiler already installed ( build-essential).

# cat x.c
#include
int main(){printf(“int is %d\n”,sizeof(int));return 0;}
#
# gcc -m64 x.c -o x64
# gcc -m32 x.c -o x32
# file x32 x64
x32: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, not stripped
x64: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, not stripped
# ./x32
int is 4
# ./x64
int is 4

Which alone is… interesting.

Research Unix v7 on the PDP-11

Posted on November 14, 2010 by neozeed

Boot
: hp(0,0)unix
mem = 2020544
# RESTRICTED RIGHTS: USE, DUPLICATION, OR DISCLOSURE
IS SUBJECT TO RESTRICTIONS STATED IN YOUR CONTRACT WITH
WESTERN ELECTRIC COMPANY, INC.
WED DEC 31 19:02:48 EST 1969

login: root
Password:
You have mail.
#

Wee that was fun. I installed it from tape, so… it was a a bit more challenging. But luckily with all the SIMH & TUHS resources I was able to extract out the setup guide and step through it for the most part.

I’ve documented the steps here, and I even uploaded a tape image to sourceforge.

I’m trying to work out installing 1 BSD, as it was just a collection of userland stuff for Unix v7, however I’m having some issues with floatingpoint, but I have some hopes I can sort my way through it.

I have some hopes of being able to get a 1 BSD & 2 BSD machine up in SIMH… These are the versions that were not full operating system, just supplements to Unix v7 from what I can tell.

Virtually Fun

Fun with Virtualization

Yearly Archives: 2010