Something weird happened when I was stress testing a build platform, I scripted out a build of all the old Qemu I could with GCC 3.4.5, and I had pointed them to a random disk. Turns out it was a Citrix Multiuser 2 disk. And something weird happened, a few of them actually booted!

I setup a simple script to have it listen on both serial ports, one for the ICA Citrix client, the other accepting a more generic serial terminal.

qemu -L pc-bios -m 64 -M isapc ^
-fda dummy.vfd ^
-hda citrix2-1b.vmdk ^
-serial telnet:127.0.0.1:5523,server,nowait ^
-serial telnet:127.0.0.1:5524,server,nowait ^
-net nic,model=ne2k_isa ^
-net user

Just very simple stuff.

I can then just boot a simple PC qemu and attach it to the other side of the serial port

qemu.exe -L pc-bios -m 8 ^
-serial telnet:127.0.0.1:5523 ^
-fda "i:\Citrix Multiuser Link 1.0 (3.5-720k)\Images\disk01.img" ^
-hda msdos5.vmdk

Sadly it’s only text mode, and at 9600 baud, which you can really feel. Sadly OS/2 PC Serial port drivers sucked.

this kind of setup for me was a bit easier to mess around with linkers as I have multiple screens to view stuff, along with a terrible modem option to transfer files. Only the console can run graphical programs, so this isn’t the one to build a Windows 3.0 farm on

If anyone was crazy enough to try this, I’d suggest the 1.0 manuals. Sorry I didn’t get a chance to scan the 2.0 stuff.

The serial ports lock & jam a lot so I made some scripts to try to deal with it, just rserial1/2 to reset the port, and logouts1/2 to logout the serial connection. Yes it’s that fragile. Being a pre-release version of OS/2 I had zero luck getting any lan client going. If I had it’d make dealing with this thing, even with NetBEUI a lot more tollerable.

I did load up Windows 3.0 by the directions so it does work, albeit standard mode only. Looking back at OS/2 6.123, while it has the OS/2 1.2 interface, it’s MS-DOS was restricted to real mode only. So this was also a nice step up.

One thing to point out is that it’ll hang at the logo screen for literally a minute. I’m not anywhere near as smart enough to debug the loop and ‘fix’ it. Sometimes it just won’t make it, so close it down, and try again. It may seem hopeless sometimes but it does work. Although this unpredictability is why there is no public Citrix 2.0 on demand. I haven’t bothered tryng to build Qemu 0.8.2 on Linux, but if it were more reliable booting and networking, combining it with xinetd having a LAN backing store of homes & apps would make for a neat Citrix on Deman farm thing.

I can’t imagine anyone wanting to play but I did upload it to archive.org.