Although I haven’t gone through this yet, I need to get some different video cables, and perhaps a monitor for my Mac Pro which has my VMWare stuff on it. Although at the same time as a past cube owner, I’m really digging the new Mac Pro design. I guess it all comes down to me finding a job in HK.
The best part about this, is that it was located by a READER. As much as I try to do everything myself, believe it or not, user contributions go a long long way. And I am greatly appreciative of it. I do need to setup my exchange server..
So I was able to get a working qemu 1.5.0 on win32. but it is so slow it really is unusable.
there is still an issue with core-routinewin32, so that has to be built with O1 optimizations, but the disk access is horrifically slow. I’ll have to see how to profile gcc code, but any write disk access spikes the CPU to 100%, and drags the whole thing down.
I have accumulated a bunch of loose pen drives with different OS installers, imaging and rescue tools. I could never find them when I needed so I have decided to put an order to it. A System Administrator’s Key Ring was born!
This one is Windows centric, however doesn’t have Windows 8 and 2012 yet. I’m now working on Linux key ring with various distributions I use.
Note that I actually do have valid licenses for all the software.
If you want to make your own here is how to make it:
Windows media are easiest. Diskpart clean and create an active Fat32 partition. Extract DVD to the USB key.
Linux media similar but apart from diskpart and extracting media you need to use Syslinux to create the MBR.
For bootable floppies use DiskImager to write the image directly to pen drive.
things happened. Anyways I built out the qemu 1.4.1 and it is horribly SLOW. I don’t know why I haven’t even begun to think about gprof or what is up with GCC 4.7.2 trying to build GLIB2 as I’m having zero luck of building out a clean version.
It takes about as long as an XT to boot MS-DOS 5, so I really don’t see this as being terribly useful to anyone.
For those wondering, I have a win32 build of 1.4.0 but it is on a hard disk that I can’t use now as I’m currently living on a boat. Â Which has been fun, but the only catch is the cheap power supply is 220v and the boat is 110v. Â Plus I don’t have a monitor. Â I should be leaving for Japan in a few weeks, so I can get a new power supply and monitor there as I plan on spending two months.
I haven’t forgotten or moved on, I’m just still on my big vacation thing.
Hong Kong has really been great, I’ve met some fabulous people out here.  If I could get a job here I’d move here in 5 minutes (well I’d just find an apartment as I’m already here…) The place is awesome, I’d recommend anyone to check it out.  But I don’t speak Mandarin or Canto so that won’t be happening.  🙁
I’ll try to do a small best of photos out here, but sadly the weather hasn’t been cooperating too well, and pollution has been off the chart… but really its a great place! .. !
(note this is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
I have been working with Linux since around 1992, both at home and at work. I have probably seen it all with exception of item in the title. Lurking around my files, I found screenshot of a beta version of Caldera Linux. For some odd reason I somehow managed to never actually see it with my own eyes back in the day. The supreme Linux desktop was always matter of just myths and legends.
Recently I came across install media for the Caldera Open Linux 1.3 and decided to take it for spin and see how it really measures to it’s hype. The system installed just fine with dialog based setup steps. However as I wanted to see the GUI in action there was a problem – 640×480 VGA mode, or rather lack of better video mode to work with.
Unfortunately neither VMware nor VirtualBox do not support anything better than the crippled VGA mode. They do it for all other devices, like network card, mouse, ide and atapi cdrom. But somehow not for graphics. Fortunately the other virtualization engines are bit better. QEMU supports Cirrus Logic and Virtual PC supports S3 Trio.
I have spent several hours trying to convince the ancient Xfree86 to work with QEMU, to no avail. All I managed t o get was this:
Â
Out of options I have decided to try Virtual PC. Unfortunately the system would not install due to disk errors. Upon some research I’ve found the issue was IO-APIC which I promptly disabled in the kernel (noacpi). It did not help the install much, but allowed me to run a qemu-installed and converted disk image.  This is a bit of shame that the best virtualization engine to run ancient Linux was Microsoft VPC. Anyway to my amusement I’ve got this:
And I was able to explore the GUI a little bit more:
Wait a second, these icons remind me of something! Apparently Visix Looking Glass became Caldera Desktop… I will need to dig in deeper in to this eventually.
Apart from that Caldera is loaded with tons of ancient software. Pretty much everything there was available on Linux these days and all working out of the box. Neozeed will be happy to see Neko in action (see the last screenshot)!
You can download install media and ready virtualized images here.
Update: Michal Necasek of OS2 Museum has fixed XF86_SVGA so that it works correctly with Virtual Box in higher resolutions as well. “You’ll have to set up the X so that it uses the XF86_SVGA server and tell it to automatically detect the graphics hardware. Then it should be just a question of selecting some sensible monitor and creating a few modes. If things are configured properly, you’ll see something like “SVGA: chipset: boxv” in the X server output.“. Download it here. (It’s binary only, no source).Â
Above screenshot is Caldera 1.3 under Virtual Box with SVGA driver from Michal Necasek. Network also work with PCnet III adapter in bridged mode. The IP address is hardcoded for 192.168.1.111. You can download OVA here.
Update: Recently I have installed Caldera 1.3 on 86box. Unlike most hypervisors, this provides excellent emulation of various video and network cards. I have picked S3 and NE2000. Everything installed and worked out of the box. While emulation is generally slower it provides accelerated video making everything working smoothly including games.
A pre-installed Caldera 1.3 for 86box is available here. Login with root/root.
Also managed to get 800×600 resolution under QEMU. To do so run with -vga cirrus and run the QW video driver with qw.vga_bios video7,1
Unfortunately the mouse doesn’t work under QEMU. Either in PS/2 or serial mode the cursor randomly jumps around with a tendency to hang around top line of the screen.
(Note this is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Enter 1988… around that time Microsoft just released MS-DOS 4.01 and IBM shipped OS/2 1.1. Compare to the other two, this QNX was years ahead of its time. Pretty much on every aspect. Now, some 25 years later QNX2 is still found running industrial machinery, clean rooms, avionics and military hardware. Some people report systems up and running non-stop for 15 years and longer!
It took me similar amount of time to acquire usable media set. QNX is an embedded system and never really seen life on a desktop machine, so finding these floppies was rather hard and expensive adventure. Fortunately I can finally let it see some daylight. Let’s examine how the system will install on a modern hardware under VMware Workstation.
The install is rather straight forward. Floppy boot comes with a login prompt.
After you log in as qnx you need to swap the floppy disk to Boot Utilities and run install. The script guides you through setup steps.
First you need to select the disk controller. For compatibility mode QNX 2 provides access via int 13 (real mode).
Then you partition the disk. QNX partition type is either 7, 8 or 9. You will be asked to mark it bootable later on.
Then you have to select the kernel. QNX can operate in real mode and protected mode on AT286.
The install script copies all the data from distribution floppy disks, asks about boot loader and active partition. Finally you get to choose some video options.
The system also asks about networking options. Unfortunately it only works with custom Arcnet cards so I skipped this. Once complete you are asked to remove the boot floppy disk and reboot the machine. This is what comes up after first hard disk boot.
I guess what is in the system will be the a topic of another post.
QNX 2.x files are here, a ready to run VMware image is here. Virtual Box here.
