Category Archives: 4.3 BSD

More packages for 4.3 BSD

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As someone has requested I have started to do lots of package updates for 4.3 BSD (the original/Vanilla version)…  Sourceforge however is doing major updates again, and I cannot add anymore files to the download sections…

Again not to gripe but I do wish sourceforge would allow you to use the old UI while they are building this new one…

Anyways I’ve managed to upload binutils/bison/flex/gmake & a few versions of GCC.  I haven’t built the c++ compiler as of yet… I just built nethack but I can’t finalize the upload though..

PUPS mail archive….

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I thought this was interesting as it’s from the start of the PUPS movement..

http://www.krsaborio.net/research/unix/pups-mail/0001.html

And I can say I got involved in the PUPS thing for sure on the 8th of May 1998..

It’s hard to think that it’s been 11 years now I’ve been lucky enough to stuble uppon Bob Supnik’s excellent emulator, and the work of the PUPs people to run version 6 research UNIX on MS-DOS….

Speaking of which, I’m kind of surpesed that there is nearly 50 downloads of the MS-DOS build of SIMH. I’m sure it has everythig to do with the small test OS’s and whatnot… But it’s still cool to me.

Also I’ve started work re-tweaking the RENO install package. I’m moving away from the 4 ra disks, to a single HP disk, that only consumes 160MB unlike the 2GB of the old setup. I hope to have that done sometime in the next week, along with fixes to the cursor keys & some more testing… I’m also going to try to track down the missing ‘adduser’ script/exe from RENO.. there is a few odds & ends missing from the TUHS RENO tape….

BSD RENO on SIMH’s microvax DZV11 vs DHQ11

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I got this note over on gunkies.org from Lei Wu:

I use the following code to replace the original dz configration. set dz disable set vh enable set vh0 normal set vh0 modem set vh0 hangup att vh 2311

After this, when the vax emulator run up, you can see some messeges on the process of booting like this

dhu0 at uba0 csr 160440 vec 300, ipl 14
qe0 at uba0 csr 174440 vec 764, ipl 15
qe0: delqa, hardware address 08:00:2b:aa:bb:cc
this mean that the hardware is recognized by virtual machine.

next step, login as root, to make dh11 device node in /dev .

sh /dev/MAKEDEV dhu0

this command will make ttyS0 – ttyS15 device node.

now, you need to modify /etc/ttys to add those termial driver to autoload when system startup next time. the parameters is same with tty01-tty07 in the original ttys file.

At last you could reboot and telnet localhost on port 2311.

you will see the prompt, but there will emerge some flaw (some messed characters). but you can neglect this, and continue input your username and password. then you will get a shell.

Now, I don’t know the reason of those messed characters. Any one can continue to explore.

So that’s a ray of sunshine for the other UNIX/BSD’s that predate RENO that can boot on the MicroVAX II… Hopefully the drivers may work on the 11/780 to help some older OS’s whose support under the dz isn’t whole enough to work….

More updates on the 4.2BSD project thing

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I updated the website after 2+ years of stagnation… lol

http://bsd42.sourceforge.net/

I know its sad, and mostly all licensing… Anyways I’m in the process of moving so no major updates in the next week to two… But once I’m settled up in New York, I’ll crank out another set of releases to include working cursor control for games, and a loaded version of Uwisc BSD with all the fun stuff ready to roll… I’m also going to do a “HP” install of Reno so it won’t be an 80Mb download anymore… I figure if people are actually using them, they can modify the configs, add more disks etc etc….

Which reminds me if there is a online 1st edition copy of the “Unix System Administration Handbook”.. That’d be cool, but otherwise, I’d recommend people to get a copy of the 1st edition as it covers the tail end of the VAX era BSD’s.

Packages so far on Uwisc 4.3BSD

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I’ve been compiling quite a bit of stuff.. Looking back it was something I intended to do back in October of 2007… Well no time like the present then! I’ve done my best to include all the relevant bits for each of the following packages. It’s entirely possible I’ve missed stuff, so feel free to re-build the stuff as you wish. Some of the packages require you to build them with GCC as the default CC won’t work. However if you are going to build it yourself you won’t be able to jump to gcc 2.7.2.2 as it requires gperf which in turn requires a working c++ compiler. So far here are the following packages:

bash-1.14.7
bash-2.0
binutils-2.8.1
bison-1.25
flex-2.5.4
gcc-1.42
gcc-2.4.5
gcc-2.5.8
gcc-2.7.2.2
gdb.3.1
gzip-1.2.4
hack.1.0.3
irc2.8.21
ircii-4.4
lynx-2.8.2
make-3.75
pine-3.87
screen-3.7.1
unzip522

All of these can be downloaded from here. I’m keeping all the source code (unaltered) in tap format for the SIMH emulator right here.

To get the C compilers going I had to build gcc 1.42 with the system compiler (cc/PCC) then use that version of GCC to build the next version. Once I had gcc 2.5.8 building, then I was able to build binutils 2.8.1 without issues, then rebuild gcc 2.5.8 to use binutils instead of the default system assembler so that I could build lynx and it wouldn’t barf because of the massive switch statement…

And no, -J didn’t help.

Speaking of lynx the search ability is broken because the function simply isn’t in 4.3 BSD (bsearch), and for pine, I had to make a fake tmpfile function that uses the /tmp/pinebox directory.

The gcc 2.5.8 package includes the C++ components, and I’m pretty sure I did with 2.7.2.2 as well. I’m not sure if GCC 3.x kept the VAX cpu so I haven’t pushed forward, but seeing that the cc1 exe is over 1mb it doesn’t seem worth it to push ahead.

I’ll have to see about including more games. The selection in this 4.3 release is kind of weak,

aardvark* boggle* hack@ monop* snake*adventure* ching* hangman* quiz* snscore*backgammon* cribbage* hunt* robots* teachgammon*battlestar* doctor* lib/ rogue* trek*bogdict* fortune* mille* sail* zork*

I’ll have to see what’s missing from where.. Also I notice that the arrow key bindings in terraterm are not working… I’ll have to dive into that as well. It may end up with a new re-relase of the emulator or a patch thing. I’ll have to see.

I should add a quick note on how to unpack these tap files. First you will need bzip2 on your native pc. You should be able to get one here.

Now just uncompress the file..

C:\Program Files (x86)\uwiscbsd>bzip2 -d lynx-2.8.2.binary.BSD-4.3.Uwisc.tap.bz2

Now you need to go to the SIMH console window. It will say something like this in it:

VAX780 simulator V3.8-1
Listening on port 42221 (socket 376)
Waiting for console Telnet connection
Running

Hit Control+E and it’ll interrupt the simulator. Then we need to attach the tap file like so:

Simulation stopped, PC: 800018A3 (MTPR #0,#12)
sim> att ts0 lynx-2.8.2.binary.BSD-4.3.Uwisc.tap
sim> c

the att command will attach the tap file to the ts0 device. the c will tell the simulator to continue. Now just switch to a tty windows (or attach a pty), then it’s a simple matter of running the following commands:

myname# cd /
myname# mt rew
myname# tar -xvmf /dev/rmt12
x /usr/local/bin/gzip, 66560 bytes, 130 tape blocks
x /usr/local/bin/lynx, 949248 bytes, 1854 tape blocks
x /usr/local/lib/lynx.cfg, 97203 bytes, 190 tape blocks
myname# rehash

Thats about all it takes, now you can run lynx. If you so wish, you can run back to the SIMH console, and tell it to “det ts0” which will detach the tape image.

Update for HACK

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I just found out that hack will run properly if it’s built with the default compiler PCC (cc). However there is a single file that will not build, but gcc can be used to build the single file, and the build process can continue as normal.

Here is a quick log:

myname# make
cc -g -c hack.Decl.c
cc -g -c hack.apply.c
cc -g -c hack.bones.c
cc -g -c hack.c
hack.c: 799: missing endif
*** Error code 1

Stop.
myname# gcc -g -c hack.c
myname# make
cc -g -c hack.cmd.c

…

cc -g -c rnd.c
cc -g -c alloc.c
Loading …
myname# size hack
text data bss dec hex
158720 47104 30404 236228 39ac4
myname# ls -l hack
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root 694272 May 10 10:23 hack
myname# strip hack
myname# ls -l hack
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root 206848 May 10 10:23 hack

And with that being said, it seems just about any version of GCC will do… from 1.27 to 2.45. I’ve test played it, and you get the tombstone when you die, not a core dump. This applies to 4.2 BSD and all the 4.3 BSD’s. I’ve updated the sourceforge binary packages that I have made for Hack to include this hybrid exe that seems to work just fine.

Happy hacking!

And update on the update

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Well I was playing around with a version of 4.3 BSD I’d never heard of, that was from the University of Wisconsin, when I figured out a quick hack to get the 4.3 BSD’s networking operational under SIMH’s 11/780 emulator. I simply removed the error checking from the recv portion in the if_de.c file, and it now works!

So I have updated some packages on the sourceforge site:

https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=204974&package_id=245145

4.3 BSD & UWisc 4.3 BSD have been added, and both are ready to run with SLiRP (User mode networking/nat).

As for the Wisconsin release, it may interest people as they had taken the NFS & VFS code from SunOS and integrated them into 4.3 BSD before the RENO time frame. From there it seems that most of the hackers at UWisconsin went on to either Legato or SUN to continue their work, leaving this release as a single event… The tape image seems to have last been used January 12th, 1987. This release does not appear on the UNIX family tree’s.. It’s like a long forgotten offshoot, but still I think it’s kind of cool. And it shows just how networking was done back then with nearly 4000 enteries in the hosts file!

I’ve been trying to track down some more info from the TUHS list, but if anyone else passing by wants to add anything, feel free to let me know!

Otherwise, the installer package on sourceforge should run on any Windows 98 or above machine.

Updates on my sourceforge BSD/SIMH packages

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On my project page I have made some new packages for 4.3BSD & 4.2BSD. Both of which can be downloaded here.

The updates include:
-moving to 3.8-1 of SIMH
-turning off unnecessary services in BSD
-moving from putty to Tera Term
-fixing PDF documentation links..

While not a major update, I figure since people are still downloading the 4.3 BSD RENO version as of TODAY I figure an update for these people wouldn’t be such a bad thing…

As before they are windows install packages, although I guess if you were so motivated you could extract them on some kind of *nix box..