Thank you for the heads-up. I also tried (at the time) the raw hdd image that I created and it failed to boot – in fact it crashed the host VirtualBox process. It seems that my VirtualBox installation was at fault – indeed, a clean install with the newest version works fine.

The floppy image does boot in a contemporary VirtualBox, just just need to tell VirtualBox to present a 1.2MB floppy drive to the guest. This has to be done with the vboxmanage command. Eg

vboxmanage setextradata “Wyse UNIX” VBoxInternal/Devices/i82078/0/LUN#0/Config/Type “Floppy 1.20”

The Wyse UNIX install can be done entirely in VirtualBox. For the second hard disk you just create a FIXED VMDK disk, say 32MB in size then overwrite it with the CPIO file and pad as necessary to make it the same size. Make sure to overwrite the actual disk image and not the vmdk header file.

Dear Botox!

Preinstalled dell unix vm image’s url is broken :'( Please fix it! Anyway, got it before, and configured slip well and working under linux host and qemu. At least, telnet $URL 80 \ GET / 1.0 # worked fine 😉

Dell Unix post with broken dl link:
http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/2012/03/20/dell-unix-lives-again/

Instead of porting aclock between archs, it should be more challenging to get tcpip working on some ancient operating systems in some virtual environment. For example: aixps2 (in bochs with slip), dell unix (qemu 0.14.x, slip), xenix386 (qemu 0.14 with slip, !!!VirtualBOX with slip or pcem with its 3c503)… (ms-|dr-|pc-|free)dos work fine with mTCP for example (under qemu with slip/ppp/nics, virtualbox with slip/nics, pce-ibmpc with slip…)

Michal Necasek already took care of that in the “Fixed” bootdisk: uncommented “stty quit ‘^c'” in the INSTALL script. However, INSTALL2 script (that would run off the HDD prepared by this bootdisk) did not have a similar line. But that wasn’t a problem since I didn’t need it anyway.
However, having a complete running system meant I could mount the bootdisk and modify the INSTALL2 script using vi, not a hex editor.
So now the installation process is quite streamlined.
The complete story: http://hawk.ro/stories/wyse/
Install instructions and files: http://hawk.ro/stories/wyse/install.html

See if you can escape INSTALL script by crashing it with CTRL-\ instead. This is how I worked around serial number in Interactive Unix 4.x. Edited the script and commented the line asking for serial number 🙂

Split tape files were provided by Al Kossow. I will thank him somehow.

The only floppy disk needed was the boot disk. It also had a nice modification (that I misinterpreted when I saw it first) to allow Ctrl-C for escaping the INSTALL script. It was nice of you to provide the split tape – that saved some time.

Thanks for doing it 🙂
It appeared very fast 😉
Did you have any trouble with floppy disks outside of IMD format? What about this copy tools disk?

Indeed it was easier in a way than the Venix one. However, it did pose some problems because of Wyse Unix console driver.. as well as RTC driver (that doesn’t work in PCem).

MESS would not work for that. I first used PCem successfully for that part, but QEMU or bochs would do it just fine also (I tried them later). The idea is somewhat similar to what Tenox used in the Dell Unix post, but my approach was simpler.