(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Pleased to announce WRP version 4.5.2. This is just a bug fix release however it also contains two frequently requested features:
UI customization via HTML template file. This has been requested by many users and it makes total sense. To use it download wrp.html from github, place in the same directory as wrp binary and edit to your liking. WRP will load built-in version if file is not present.
This should enable easy development of more modern UI for never browsers. Potentially with JS and CSS. Please send PR if you make something!
Second most frequently asked feature – re-capture (retake?) of a screenshot without page reload. For example if the page did not capture correctly or if something is changing on the page.
I have also updated Docker Hub and gcr.io repos.
Sun IPX using WRP at VCF West
As usual please test and report bugs!
The next update will focus on issues with page size, viewport and rendering full length pages (h=0) which is currently very broken.
(This is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
I have been living under a rock for several years now when it comes to Windows development. Recently wanting to do some maintenance on couple of my projects I needed to download Visual Studio and Windows SDK. Poking around the download page I have discovered that Microsoft now provides a fully pre-installed VMs with Visual Studio, SDK etc. for VMware, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and Parallels. That’s actually super cool and handy. Thank you Microsoft!
Looks like this has been available for 3 or 4 years now. Oh well.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
I previously lamented about lack of a small text editor for Windows text mode console. Something simple to just edit a text, configs, .ini, .reg or .cmd/bat files. Kind of like edit.com in MSDOS and Windows 3.x/9.x. Edit.com could even run under Windows NT up until XP inside NTVDM DOS emulator. I seen plenty of people use it this way. Sadly, instead of porting it to the modern Windows it was just whacked. While there are plenty of 3rd party editors to choose from none of them is perfect. They are either expensive, overly complicated, poorly ported from Unix, VMS or TOPS20, no longer maintained or require a steep learning curve for a casual Windows user.
There really isn’t much to talk about Yori. It has no special features. It doesn’t try to be an IDE, word processor, hex editor or an operating system. It’s just a perfect replacement for edit.com. Thank you Malcolm! I really wish that Microsoft just put it in Windows 10 now.
Yedit on Windows 10
While checking out Yedit you should also give Yori a try. It’s really a fantastic CMD replacement shell.
Since a lot of people (especially Zir Blazer) tried to use the available QNX 1.2 / QNX 2 tools to install a HDD boot loader and load the existing kernel, I decided to take a different approach and build a new loader. At first I was under the impression that maybe a BIOS disk driver was already present in the kernel. After realizing that there was no HDD driver included, I decided to try reverse-engineering the relevant parts of QNX.
Starting from the start (boot sector) helped me extract the kernel from the boot diskette and analyze it just enough to validate that it’s the right thing and the assumed entry point is correct.
In order to make things easier (and because it was a fun project per se) I wrote a somewhat simple QNX filesystem access tool that enabled me to extract files from the diskette and HDD images.
Going for mount
Afterwards, my main activity was centered on mount. As opposed to typical Linux/Unix mount, here it also loads the HDD driver. After finding out the executable file format (ftp.qnx.com/usr/free2/technotes/qnx_load) I wrote another small tool to extract the code and data segments of QNX executables. Analyzing the disassembly, I have determined what operations mount performs in order to install the driver and mount a QNX partition. The main steps are:
load the driver file contents into malloc-ed buffer (inside the data segment of mount)
send a TA_ALLOC_SEG message to task in order to allocate a separate segment and copy driver there
build a DEFINE_DRIVER message using data from driver file and the allocated segment address and send the message to fsys (part of kernel, but separate task)
send a SET_ATTR message to fsys that has the side-effect of initializing the driver
use the driver to read first HDD sector (partition table)
send another SET_ATTR message to adjust disk size and offset to values read from partition
Knowing this gave me an idea to what my loader would need to do beside simply loading the kernel from HDD. However, this still depended on having an already running kernel to send messages to.
Back to kernel
The kernel is split into 5 parts:
task (task and memory management)
fsys (disk and filesystem)
dev (terminal devices)
idle (CPU arbiter)
shared (int 72 handler, mostly libc and other shared functions)
Description in parenthesis are my assumptions.
The copy protection routine (tries to read the last sector from diskette and if the read succeeds resets the computer) provides a good entry-point into the fsys part of the kernel. I assumed it can be replaced with some code to emulate what mount does. However, trying to allocate a segment (via TA_ALLOC_SEG message) hangs. I think this is causing a deadlock, since fsys initialization is called from task before it finished its initialization. Fortunatelly, while digging into this I noticed the header structure of the kernel, thus enabling me to increase its size in order to fit the xt driver at the end of fsys (it would have been slightly easier to put it at the end of shared, but that didn’t occur to me at the time).
Failing to use syscalls (DEFINE_DRIVER and SET_ATTR) meant I had to determine what those messages actually did. I disassembled fsys separately and proceeded to manually follow the code path in order to determine the effect each of those messages should have in the context of mounting a disk. Eventually it emerged that almost all of the data structures can be prefilled in the kernel image, leaving only the call to driver initializaion function.
I modified the kernel to add the xt driver at the end of fsys (modifying the header by hand), replaced the copy-protection routine with code to call its initialization, and indeed the harddrive was available from the start, without the need to run mount. I was still booting from diskette at this time but I was past the most difficult hurdle.
Finishing touches
Loading the kernel proved somewhat simple (I still have some knowledge about 16-bit assembly and real-mode BIOS) but the kernel “insisted” in trying to run /cmds/sh from floppy. At first I solved this by an ugly hack, modifying the command line string in kernel image from “/cmds/sh” to “3:/xi/sh” and “/config/sys.init” to “3:/xi/sys.init” (3: being the HDD identifier, similar to C: from DOS). The xi was needed in order to keep the same string length, or at least not making it larger since there was some other importand data just past this.
This mostly solved the challenge (there were some other minor mistakes and fixes), except I disliked that hack and went on to analyzing that first start of /cmds/sh, disassembling fopen (in shared) and finally finding the memory location where of the search system variable (somewhat similar to PATH). Modifying that variable eliminated the need for starting the first shell with “3:”.
Room for improvement
At present some parameters are hardcoded and the kernel is just placed at the end of the HDD, outside of QNX parition and its position and size is written in the boot sector (somewhat similar to the original QNX diskette approach). The partition size itself is hardcoded (by hand) in the kernel data structures instead of being read from the partition table on boot. Still, for something that is unlikely to ever run outside an emulator, I deem it good enough (for now).
Thanks
to Zir Blazer for putting a lot of effort into his approach and documenting each step
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
I certainly can’t claim to be the first as this has already been done by our friends at OS/2 Museum. However with low vanilla VGA resolution and no networking the results were unsatisfactory. Having so much success with 86Box I decided to try to do a little better.
I bought my UnixWare 1.0 media kit years ago on eBay. Unlike the tape set owned by OS/2 Museum mine had CDROM as install media. Unfortunately despite many many tries with different types of cdrom/bus/ide/scsi card I could never get the OS to see it. The cdrom/iso image is just a typical set of sysv packages. As such I wanted to see if it would be possible to convert it to a set of floppy disk images and install this way. Attached the iso image in UnixWare 7.1.4 VM and did a pkgtrans like so:
pkgtrans -s cdrom1 diskette1
From there I created a bunch of floppy disk images, which I later used for installation. Thanks to Plamen I was also able to get TCP/IP disks which I added to the install set.
Update: thanks to ArtiomWin I also got a BusLogic HBA driver disk, which allowed me to see the cdrom attached over SCSI. As such I decided to remaster the original iso image with added TCP/IP set, Update package and bash+gzip. The iso image is here.
Upon first boot after install from CDROM you get prompted to choose a NIC driver:
Unfortunately none of them really worked in 86Box for some reason. They get detected and you can see the MAC Address but not much after that. 3C503 and NE2K freeze the system, WD works bit better but you can’t really communicate with anything. Maybe it’s just my PCap configuration.
After installation I mounted the cdrom again and added TCP/IP set:
One of main issues bugging me was lack of proper resolution. UnixWare 1.0 has a high resolution mode for Tseng ET4000 card which is supported in 86Box. You can change the resolution using /usr/X/adm/setvgamode as root. It worked perfectly, except for fonts, which required some surgery in /usr/X/defaults/Xwinfont (remove everything after 75dpi font path). This is how it looks like fixed up:
UnixWare comes with Merge DOS emulator. It can even run graphical applications in windowed mode for CGA and HGC. VGA is only possible in full screen mode.
All this cool stuff before Linux was even born!
DOS Menu is invoked by Scroll Lock. You can switch consoles between text and X11 by pressing CTRL+ALT+SYSRQ and ‘p’. I have also added bash and gzip binaries.
The ready to run 86Box image is here. Virtual Box OVA here. Install media here. Login with user/user, root/root.
Technically the competition has been won by Crazyc who was the first to submit disk images with copy protection worked around. He however waived his monetary prize and did not do any further work on making whole system bootable from hard disk.
While the copy protection turned out to be quite easy to circumvent and several people did it independently, installation on a hard disk proved to be quite impossible. You can fdisk, create partitions, lay out file system, mount and copy files to hard disk. However there is no way to install a boot loader and the kernel. QNX 2.x and above provide a way of doing it but unfortunately not version 1.x. Many people including various QNX gurus looked at it and we all gave up at this point.
Probably the only reasonable way of using hard disk with QNX 1.x is to copy all files from all the floppies to the hdd. Then use the boot floppy disk for booting and the rest from hard disk. This is likely why the disk set came with a backup copy of boot disk. This is what Forty eventually did in effect winning the competition. Forty supplied a 86Boxready to run configuration with patched and modified boot floppy to mount and use the hard disk image. I have buffed it up a bit to a faster XT and EGA video for better resolution. This is how it looks like during boot:
You can safely ignore date/time prompt with enter. To login to the system just enter slash ‘/‘ as the user name:
You can find all the binaries in /cmds directory. The system does have some sort of networking facility but I have not figured it out yet. Probably a good candidate to explore in another post.
QNX has a super cool editor which is basically ed on steroids. Documentation for it can be found in 2.x manuals.
Also working C compiler:
Finally QNX has some sort of a DOS emulator or hypervisor called QDOS:
Unfortunately I don’t know how to exit that. There is a little bit information about QDOX in expl inform section about other QNX products:
Congratulations to Forty for winning the competition and gettin $100 via PayPal. Thanks to his time and work you can boot and play the system yourself. 86Box files are here.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
In a recent few virtualization projects, such as QNX 1.2 (and demo disk), Interactive Unix (also older post) and Caldera (and older post), I have tried the 86Box emulator. Unlike typical hypervisors, 86Box emulates a wide variety of video and network cards. Everything I tried simply worked out of the box, so instantly fell in love. 86Box is now my daily drive for running old PC operating systems. I have decided to revisit some of previously half assed virtualization attempts with the awesome new emulator.
I have virtualized Dell Unix back in 2012 using Bochs and QEMU. Even with the community support, we have struggled to get a decent video resolution and had to resort to use of SLIP for networking. Today let me reintroduce Dell Unix more properly! With 1024×768, 256 colors video and proper networking using emula NIC.
The journey started with allsoft.img which is an image of the OS and all packages installed from a tape on Bochs. I have disabled a few services in /etc/rc2.d namely mouse daemon (mse), sendmail, uucp, lp, etc.
For X Window I have edited /usr/lib/X11/Xconfig, enabled serial mouse (Microsoft) and 1024×768 mode. I have used Tseng ET4000AX VGA which is recognized by Xmach server. This allowed X / xinit to run correctly. However for startx to work you also need to edit /usr/lib/X11/xinit/xserverrc, as it seems to be using slightly different configuration. For graphical login you can add something like x:3:respawn:/usr/bin/X11/xdm -nodaemon to /etc/inittab. However I have noticed that when ran from init, xdm seem not to pick up the Dell customized config files. Perhaps rc startup script should be created instead.
As a final note on X, the system has virtual consoles. Like other SVR4 you access them by pressing SYSRQ and F keys. F1 is a text mode console, F2 is Xserver. This is my Dell Unix hero shot:
Dell Unix running under 86Box
Networking was even easier. Dell Unix supports WD8003 and 3C503 NICs. Firstly I wanted to try the WD. In /etc/conf/pack.d/wdn/space.c you can find the predefined hardware probes. I have picked one of supported modes and the card was detected on subsequent reboot. That’s it. No need for kernel rebuild or any configuration. I have not tried 3C503 yet, but if you want the driver for it is named ie6. For TCP/IP configuration you set your IP address in /etc/hosts and gateway in /etc/inet/rc.inet file.
I was able to quickly compile Mosaic, which curiously had Makefile settings for Dell Unix. Took it for a spin on the web with help of WRP:
One could probably want to compile more recent version of Mosaic with PNG support or maybe some more recent browser all together.
The system comes with a bunch of open source software in /usr/dell, however suprisingly there is no bash or even gzip. I have compiled some essentials. They are available here and as a /usr/local tarball.
For the lazy, as usual you can get a complete os image for 86Box here. Make sure to attach pcap to your local network interface and set IP address / gateway / dns server accordingly.
If you port some cool software or find any interesting gems in Dell Unix please comment!
Have fun with virtualization!
Update: I been looking at contents of various distribution media for Dell Unix that have surfaced here and there. On a DAT tape I bought on eBay a few years back I found this file:
Whoa! Of course I want to install all of it! This is how FrameMaker 3.0 looks on Dell Unix:
I have updated the disk image for 86Box to have this included. You can run demo mode of FrameMaker by executing /usr/frame/bin/demomaker. I also imagine that this can be installed on pretty much any x86 SVR4 and above, maybe even Linux. If anyone has a license code / serial number please let me know!
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
In a recent post about OpenServer and Merge I covered OpenServer 5 and Merge 5.3. Thanks to a comment from Uli I have learned about MergePro which looks like is a rebranded Win4Lin. Intrigued I wanted to try it especially that you can download it from SCO ftp server as Uli pointed.
I’m going to be using VMware Fusion on Mac, which is now free for personal use. They call it Fusion Player, however unlike Workstation and Player, it has exactly same features as non-free Fusion version. For the OS I’m going to use Xinuos OpenServer 6 Definitive, however you can easily download OpenServer 6.0.0Ni from the ftp. I also have copies in my archive.
Installation is straightforward. You can skip licensing and use evaluation license, however for convenience you can use following keys:
If you are installing 6.0.0Ni you will also need MP4 update. 6D2M1 is already patched.
To install MergePro you need to copy this package to the host os and install like so:
# pkgadd -d /tmp/MergePro-6.3.0-04f_pkgadd.stream
In the following step, mount Windows 2000 or XP SP1 or SP2 ISO and run:
# loadwinproCD
Once Windows is loaded you need to install it as a non-root user using:
$ installwinpro
After it’s installed, to run you type:
$ winpro
Unfortunately I have failed to install Windows XP with variety of errors and blue screens. Windows 2000 works fine, however it feels bit sluggish and mouse click doesn’t always register. It looks like there are some sort of Windows Guest Additions being injected in to the OS so one would expect this to work just fine.
During startup I have noticed that MergePro installs and uses KQEMU kernel module. Also this screen looks suspiciously familiar… where did I see this before?
The BIOS and VGABios look definitely stolen from Bochs. HDD controllers look like Win4Lin. I’m not going to go in to deeper analysis of what MergePro is made of at this time. Looks like a topic for another article or even better – your comments 🙂
Also if you want to license the copy of Merge use following key:
MergePro 6.3.0f: SCO138318 / bhtecusg
Finally for the lazy here is fully installed OVA, password is root/root and tenox/tenox for the regular user.
UPDATE: Thanks to reader Larbob we now know that you can install any guest OS, on MergePro not only Windows! Use installwinpro -c /dev/cdrom/cdrom1 -w winxppro to boot the cdrom without checking what OS is actually on it. Here is a screenshot of Solaris x86 being installed on MergePro on UnixWare:
So.. you could install UnixWare as a guest VM under OpenServer or vice versa??
In the previous post about SCO Merge I briefly mentioned WABI, which is a Windows ABI emulator for Unix. Initially released by Sun Microsystems, it’s believed that it came with acquisition of Interactive Systems Corp (ISC) and Interactive UNIX. It was available for SPARC, x86 and PowerPC Solaris as well as IBM AIX. Around 1997 it was released for x86 Linux by Caldera. This article will focus on Caldera’s version specifically.
Although entirely possible to install WABI on another RPM based distribution such as Red Hat, I’m a purist and wanted to try it on Caldera Open Linux. The install is pretty straightforward you mount the iso file and run install script. In a next step you need to install an update to version 2.2D. This is done by replacing /opt/wabi/bin/wabiprog with extracted version of this file. Thanks to readers of this blog post for sharing these.
When launched for the first time, you will be prompted to provide copy of Windows 3.1. This the main difference with WINE which specifically does not require copy of windows to run apps. I have noticed that WABI is rather picky about lower vs uppercase when installing software. There is an utility called wabimakelower to help there. You can also add an icon to one of Caldera Linux / Looking Glass program groups.
Once you run it, it’s Windows 3.1 as usual:
WABI was designed for running productivity apps such as Office:
You can even run Visual Studio:
Curiously WABI is not a MS-DOS emulator. In order to run DOS apps you need to install such and configure it in WABI Control Panel:
For the lazy, a readily preinstalled version is available as OVA and 86box. Root password is “caldera”.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
A friend and I were recently discussing differences between WABI, WINE, WISE, Merge, VP/IX, FX!32 and SoftWindows. This article covers Merge specifically which is a DOS/Windows emulator initially built for AT&T 6300 Plus computer. Later ported to UnixWare, OpenServer and eventually served as basis for Win4Lin. Later versions of Merge were build using Microsoft WISE SDK which allowed to run apps without full copy of Windows kind of like WINE. I will be running it on OpenServer 5 using VirtualBox. However one could get it going on UnixWre and under any other hypervisor same as easy.
For Vbox/OSR5, when creating a VM, make it other/other type, give 256MB to 1GB RAM and 4GB HDD. Once VM is created go to Settings and change network adapter to Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop and Attachment to Bridge mode. For some reason I could not get DHCP working out of the box. Also under Display change graphics controller to VM SVGA.
One can get the last “real” OSR5 from this link. There also are never Xuinos versions and specifically targeted for VMware, for example this one.
Boot and go through the prompts as normal. At some point you will be stopped by a lovely prompt for license number and code:
Enter SCO043568 / pnhohvqm to get past this.
Watch out for this screen:
Don’t worry about not being able to get the NIC detected at this point. Leave it as Deferred for now. You need to install MP5 update and a driver update for this to work. This will be covered later.
Select some decent resolution for VESA SVGA:
Also select PS/2 Mouse:
The rest should just fly through on autopilot. Once system boots login as root with the password you set.
First thing you will need to install MP5 update. Download the ISO file from this link and attach to your hypervisor. Open the terminal and type “custom” to install software. Or double click that fancy “Software Manager” icon on the desktop. Under Software click Install New… and select this host. Select your attached cdrom.
You will need to install Maintenance Pack 5 and GFX / NIC Drivers:
Make sure to hit install twice one for each of these items as they cannot be selected together. Once complete you will need to reboot of course.
After reboot you should be able to add and configure the NIC. You will need to either run “scoadmin” or go to System Administration – Networks – Network Configuration Manager. Add a new LAN adapter. The Intel PRO/1000 should be detected automatically. I could never get DHCP to work and just used static IP config there. Make sure to ok re-link the kernel and reboot.
Installation of merge is a little bit more complicated. The latest version can be downloaded from here. If you are installing under UnixWare then this is your folder. Transfer it to your OSR5 VM via browser, ftp, samba, iso file or however you like. Open a terminal and go to the directory with the cpio file file and run:
cpio -icv -I osr5_merge5323a_vol.cpio
This will produce a bunch of VOL* files. These are installed with “custom” as well. However instead of cdrom you select Media Images and point to the directory with extracted VOL files:
There should be an option to install Merge.
You will be also prompted by a lovely license code prompt. Enter SCO837369 / bhtepkxy to get through. You will need to reboot again.
After login there will be a new folder on the desktop with Merge tools:
Root is not allowed to run it, but you can pre-install Windows as root. To do so go to Merge Setup and open System Wide Administration. You will find a button to Load Windows CD. You can just mount any bootable Windows 9x cdrom to your hypervisor and Merge will copy it for you.
There will be a prompt for network configuration. I opted for WinSock option which is user mode emulation, it’s enough to get a web browser going. If you need to use SMB/CIFS, open network shares, etc you will need the bridged mode with extra IP address for the guest.
Finally you will need to create and login as a different user to get this thing running.
This is the final product, with 4 level inception:
For the lazy of course provided is a fully installed OVA, one with VBox NIC and one with VMware NIC. Passwords are root/root and tenox/tenox. Note that this image has a static IP address of 192.168.1.111.
