Heh I don’t know why I did it either.  … Although it was good fun to work out the flags on Qemu to get the monitor to work over telnet …

-monitor telnet:127.0.0.1:4444,server,nowait

Other than that there is no sound just me installing.

That’s right, the impossible (or so it would have seemed years ago) is done. Qemu 0.14.0‘s floppy controller is good enough to install Xenix, although it needs a little help…

You see, booting up by default you get this:

But after going to this page, I had an idea. You see the fd(64) ties into /dev/fd0, however the specific 3 1/2″ high density diskette device id is 60.

So let’s change the default boot strings from:

fd(64)xenix root=fd(64) swap=ram(0) pipe=ram(1) swplo=0 nswap=1000 ronly

into:

fd(60)xenix root=fd(60) swap=ram(0) pipe=ram(1) swplo=0 nswap=1000 ronly

I’ve created a 200MB IDE disk, remembering that Xenix didn’t like big disks, which is why so many people failed installs on actual PC’s.

qemu-img.exe create -f qcow2 xenix.disk 200M
Formatting ‘xenix.disk’, fmt=qcow2 size=209715200 encryption=off cluster_size=0

So let’s boot up Qemu like this:

qemu.exe -L pc-bios -m 16 -hda xenix.disk -fda n1 -no-fd-bootchk

Looks, good, let’s boot!

Whats this? Are we actually going to install?! This is amazing!

So let’s go through with the install!

I’m going to select the American keyboard. Maybe you want something different?

Next we select the standard IDE controller.

It’s a VM so go ahead and overwrite my empty disk…

And this shows that it sees my 200MB IDE disk correctly. I guess you could play with larger disk images and verify that these results look sane. I recall that if you pick something too big, this part will give some exotic error like this:

Ouch!

And blammo. This is why we use a small disk!

I’m not even entertaining dual booting in a VM, so we go all the way here.

Looks good!

And we quit as this is just fine.

Our little virtual disk won’t have any bad sectors so we quit.

Ok, ok, Xenix wants *SOME* tracks, so I let it have the ‘suggested’ 15. Maybe it’ll feel better about it.

And again I’m going with some default swap space.

And I’m going to use a big filesystem, no separate /u filesystem.

Everything is fine, no changes.

Then it’ll make the filesystem which will take a minute or so, then prompt for the serial number.

And then the activation key.

Now we are done with preparing the hard disk, so you can stop Qemu.

I’m going to continue this in part two.

Ok, we left off from part one, having prepared the hard disk. Now we are going to boot off the hard disk like this:

qemu.exe -L pc-bios -m 16 -hda xenix.disk -fda b1

 

Now if we go ahead and try to install normally it’ll fail like this:

 

Which isn’t good at all.

Instead, what we are going to do is hit the delete key breaking us to an install shell.

So at the shell, we are going to fix the install/rinstall devices to force them to the 3 1/2″ high density diskette like this:

cd /dev
ln -f fd0135ds18 install
ln -f rfd0135ds18 rinstall
cd /
. /.profile

Now we can proceed with the install, and since diskette B1 is already in the drive, we just hit enter. Once the B diskette is copied, the install script will prompt for a root password.

Now it’s time to pick a timezone, and yes, I’m in North America.

In EST.

And sadly, yes we do DST. (*NOTE being this old, you can bet the offsets are all wrong for DST, I’m sure there is some deal to update the files, but I’m not sure of it off hand. But it’d be nice to update the timezone stuff for 4.2BSD as well).

Let’s continue with the install.

And let’s finish the operating system install.

Now we’ll need the X1 diskette…

So far we’ve not needed to swap diskettes live under Qemu, but I thought I’d remind people that it’s a simple matter of hitting ctrl+alt+2 to bring up the Qemu console, then typing in:

change floppy0 x1

To verify you’ve even done this correctly, you can issue a “info block” command, and you should now see the floppy0 device referencing the x1 file.

Once you are done, you can switch back by hitting ctrl+alt+1

We are going to install one or more…

All of them as a matter of fact.

I’m going to fast forward a little here, and process all the X diskettes… there isn’t much to see here, it’ll prompt for a diskette, mount it in the qemu console, and switch back and proceed.

Yes this is a root only install, KISS (Keep it simple stupid) as they say.

Now it’ll prompt for the backup user password, then start to compress man pages. Needless to say on a fast computer this takes mere seconds… Not so back in the day on a 386!

Now it’ll prompt for the sysadm password, generate the termcap, then it’s time to swap series to the N series diskettes..

Now onward to N2.

Time to license & activate the system. Again.

Ok we are done.

And there we go, Xenix is installed!

A quick reboot, and we are ready to go!

So looking back, we’ve just done the impossible, we’ve installed Xenix on Qemu.