(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
I was recently registering a new OpenVMS Community License. In the process I learned that there is a ready to run, pre-installed and pre-configured VM with OpenVMS 8.4. Completely free for non-commercial purposes. You don’t even need to register or leave your details (WOW). Just download and run! Thank you VSI!
https://training.vmssoftware.com/student-license/
The student kit runs only on Windows as contains FreeAXP emulator. However it’s super easy to download, install and run.
I’m hoping that in near future once x86 OpenVMS port is ready there will be images for x64 hypervisors like VMware, VirtualBox, Hyper-v and QEMU/KVM hopefully.
Aww man, looks like I missed the mark on this, dang it…
Any chance you’ll opening this again ?
Keep me posted please.
This seems to run OK under Wine! I’m not sure how, at the moment, but this is what I did (on Ubuntu 18.04.06 LTS). Using the details on the VSI site, log in to their sftp server, and download VSIOPENVMSSTUDENTPACKAGE.EXE. Run this under Wine, and the installer starts, and seems to complete successfully. A PuTTY window may, or may not appear. I had to close it, and kill the DEC.EXE process that was running in Linux. Then, search in the KDE menu for “VSI”, and run “OpenVMS Student Package”. PuTTY reappears, bootup messages go past, and after quite a long wait, the logout message of the system startup appears, and pressing “Return” gets you a “Username:” prompt! Login as SYSTEM (no password), and you get the DCL prompt. I’ve no idea why this works, but the emulator seems to run ok under Wine.