Category Archives: unix

Wyse Unix Lives Again! (sort of)

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I was waiting for this for a long time. Recently I came in to possession of a box of 5.25″ floppy disks, among them following find:

Thanks to efforts of Al Kossow of bitsavers.org and Michal Necasek of OS/2 Museum we got the system to boot on VirtualBox!

Unfortunately we are missing the rest of the system which was distributed either on 15 floppy disks or a tape. If anyone has it, please let me know…

Little bits of information I have found on the web about Wyse Unix:

Interestingly Wyse Unix is a supported os emulation for iBCS.

Update: A full install tape has been found and the system has been fully installed

Dell UNIX Lives Again!

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(please note that this is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki)

Dell UNIX is so ultra rare among rare Unix species that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. I have been hunting this elusive but important piece of computer history for well over 15 years now. Fortunately thanks to Charles H. Sauer and his excellent blog post I was finally able to lay my hands on disk and tape images and the restoration process begun.

The install tape

The system can be installed from either a tape or network server (presumably NFS). Unfortunately no virtualization software can emulate a tape drive. Hopes for a network install are even slimmer since the required network support floppy disk has been lost and chances of suitable Ethernet driver working in Bochs or Qemu are equal to that of finding the lost floppy disk.

I have decided to try a hard disk image from a readily pre-installed system. The original Dell 486 workstation had a 1GB SCSI hard disk. Unfortunately neither Dell UNIX supports LBA mode nor Qemu/Bochs support the Adaptec 154x controller required by the OS.

As all normal install options have been exhausted, the only option left was to use a second hard disk image as source of cpio archive files. Booting from the two install floppies and attaching two disk images was a snap. The next step was to inject the tape “file” in to a right place on the disk, so it can be read by cpio command. A hard disk in Dell UNIX is pretty much unusable without a valid SysV partition and VTOC. Fortunately dellsetup command does it all for you. Once VTOC was put in place I’ve attached the transfer disk image as a loopback device in my host OS. In couple of iterations I was able to aim the host os dd if=file1 of=/dev/loop0 bs=512 seek=offset at the right place, which you work out using prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/1s0 command. Then cpio -ict < /dev/dsk/1s1 was able to list contents of the emulated tape… with errors…

In my infinite wisdom, for some unknown reason I’ve assumed that LBA addressing is required above 540MB. So to be on a safe side I have made the hard disk images 512 MB. What a mistake it was! I have lost several hours trying to figure out cpio header errors coming from the disk… By pure coincidence, while the tape archive was installing (with errors) I was researching for this very blog article and found that LBA starts at 504 MB… Recreating the hard disk images just few MB smaller took all tape and prior boot problems away!

Once the cpio archive was extracted I have made few final touches taken from the original tape install script. After a reboot Dell UNIX booted perfectly. You can experience this by using the firstboot image file. The final part of installation was injecting the second tape file containing System V PKG file to the transfer disk image and running pkgadd -d /dev/dsk/1s1. This is what’s included on allsoft.img.

Dell Unix at First Boot

Some final notes on running the OS:

  • To enable mouse to work:
    • Qemu just add “-chardev msmouse,id=msmouse -device isa-serial,chardev=msmouse” to the launch arguments.
    • Bochs add to the config file:
      mouse: type=serial, enabled=1      
      com1: enabled=1, mode=mouse
      then you have to kill mousemgr process and prevent from starting by deleting /etc/rc2.d/S25mse
      then edit /usr/lib/X11/Xconfig:
      disable Xqueue      
      enable Microsoft Mouse
  • To enable keyboard to work correctly in VirtualBOX start with Num Lock OFF.
  • You can use qemu-img utility to convert the image to VMware vmdk to use in VirtualBox.
  • To run X window type startx

X11 and all its glory

  • To attach it to internet use SLIP as there is no working Ethernet driver.  Contrary to most UNIXen of the time, the command is not slattach, but rather slipattach.  Thankfully it does work the same way.  I have found that running Dell Unix with VirtualBOX, along with Windows NT 4.0 I was able to connect into the Dell Unix VM, and get network access.  Just set the two VM’s up for a named pipe (\\.\pipe\dellunix) and make one of them a server, and start that VM 1st.  The steps to prepare Windows NT have been outlined before.

Telnet via SLIP

Legal disclaimer: Dell UNIX is a commercial software and should not be distributed without manufacturers permission. However as the operating system has been dead for 20 years and with a long tradition from Unix Heritage Society and Bitsavers I’m publishing this in good faith under abandonware category. If Dell or any other copyright holder wishes this software removed, please let me know.

Attached are:

  • firstboot image
  • all (pkg) software installed
  • setup instructions if you wish to install from scratch.

Download:

You may also be interested in my post about a sister System V operating system – Interactive UNIX:

Update: Dell Unix now runs on 86Box with higher resolution and proper networking.

xv6 revisited…

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I was hoping to do more with this, but things are going other ways in life.  Anyways a while back I had touched on xv6, a MIT teaching tool and semiport of Unix v6 to the i386!  The best part about it, is that it is SMALL…

I’ve been playing with it the last day on the latest version of Qemu and hit a snag with its SMP support (yes it does have that!) so I played with it, and couldn’t figure it out so I had to turn it off.. It is something ACPI related, and probably along the reason why Windows x64 doesn’t run on new Qemu either..

I’ve built the cross compiling environment needed (A bare elf compiler/linker/assembler) and managed to smash enough of it into a single directory that you won’t need MinGW installed, but can rather invoke ‘build.bat’ which will compile link, dd the disk image, and launch Qemu.

I’ve had trouble with mkfs so… you’ll have to live with a prebuilt root image.

If you want to build your own cross compiling toolchain, there is a good guide here on the OSWiki.  Naturally you’ll want my previous post on some snags I ran into on MinGW if you do choose that as your target environment.

What I’d love to do is port newlib, and see just how useful this xv6 could become..  I would imagine adding signals (well beyond kill) may allow things like bash 1.x to run, and maybe gcc itself.. Which would be cool.

You can download my work here.  Check it out, it’s cool!

4.1c BSD

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It’s been a long while since I’ve posted anything VAX BSD related.  So I found this ISO image a while back that had all these old versions of BSD on them, but sadly many of them are incomplete, missing parts, and give really no clue on how to use them.  There is even some duplication thrown in there just to complicate things further.  So I figured I’d try one of them, an interim release of 4 BSD and see if I could just overlay a newer release version and see what I get…

VAX780 simulator V3.8-1
Listening on port 23 (socket 156)
loading ra(0,0)boot
Boot
: ra(0,0)vmunix
215688+63964+69764 start 0xf98
4.1c BSD UNIX #2: Tue Aug 28 09:39:12 PDT 1984
real mem  = 8384512
avail mem = 7036928
using 148 buffers containing 838656 bytes of memory
mcr0 at tr1
mcr1 at tr2
uba0 at tr3
hk0 at uba0 csr 177440 vec 210, ipl 15
rk0 at hk0 slave 0
rk1 at hk0 slave 1
uda0 at uba0 csr 172150 vec 774, ipl 15
ra0 at uda0 slave 0
ra1 at uda0 slave 1
zs0 at uba0 csr 172520 vec 224, ipl 15
ts0 at zs0 slave 0
dz0 at uba0 csr 160100 vec 300, ipl 15
mba0 at tr8
root on ra0
WARNING: should run interleaved swap with >= 2Mb
Automatic reboot in progress...
Tue Aug 28 09:54:53 PDT 1984
/dev/rra0a: 836 files, 6010 used, 1419 free (35 frags, 173 blocks)
/dev/rra0h: 6598 files, 41780 used, 320080 free (160 frags, 79980 blocks)
Tue Aug 28 09:54:58 PDT 1984
local daemons: telnetd ftpd tftpd syslog sendmail.
preserving editor files
clearing /tmp
standard daemons: update cron accounting berknet mail printer.
starting network: rshd rexecd rlogind rwhod routed.
Tue Aug 28 09:55:00 PDT 1984

ucbmonet login: root
Last login: Tue Aug 28 09:44:44 on tty00
4.1c BSD UNIX #2: Tue Aug 28 09:39:12 PDT 1984
Master source now lives here; freeze your 4.1c stuff now.
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not
certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
                -- Albert Einstein
monet#

Pretty cool.  And oddly enough googling around doesn’t seem to find much about people running 4.1c BSD, but it is significant with the first version of sendmail being bundled, and rogue.

The release also includes TCP/IP support but I haven’t the slightest idea how to use it.  I suppose reading the instructions is key.  But I thought I’d share this little fossil first.

For those who want to try it, you can download it here.  It’s using SIMH, so if you aren’t running Windows, bring your own VAX 11/780 and you’ll be good to go.

Sysadmin rosetta stone.

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A friend passed this link on to me, and it’s a good place to turn for some old/foreign OS’s.

It’s covers some basic tasks with the following OS’s:

  • AIX
  • A/UX
  • DG/UX
  • FreeBSD
  • HP-UX
  • IRIX
  • Linux
  • Mac OS X
  • NCR Unix
  • NetBSD
  • OpenBSD
  • Reliant
  • SCO OpenServer
  • Solaris
  • SunOS 4
  • Tru64
  • Ultrix
  • UNICOS

Always a good thing to have handy if you run into a supercomputer…..

AT&T 3b1 emulator

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while checking out some random link on some vintage ads, I found this exciting development..

Philip Pemberton’s 3b1 emulator.

While a work in progress, he’s getting there, so far it’s capable of booting the diagnostic diskette, although I couldn’t get it to run any programs….

3b1 emulator

3b1 emulator

I’ve personally only dealt with the 3b2’s so I don’t know all that much about the 3b1’s short of them running some SYSV (r2?) Unix, and it was some half hearted attempt by AT&T at marketing Unix to the masses.

I’ve built the emulator under windows, and compressed it up here.

It’s interesting though, and more interesting to see where it will go…

Old Unix tree’s

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Well I was looking for a good way to see what changed between Net/2, 386BSD 0.0 and 386BSD 0.1 and it appears that nobody has a cvsweb of these early versions….

What is strange, is that cvsweb package for debian is lacking the actual cgi file.. So after going insane with cvsweb, I set one up.

http://unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/#dirlist

I’ve never really setup a CVS repository before so this was my first shot…

rm -rf /var/lib/cvs
mkdir -p /var/lib/cvs
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs init
cd /var/www/unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/Net2
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs import -m “Net/2” Net2 CSRG Net2
cd /var/www/unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/386BSD-0.0
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs import -m “386BSD 0.0” Net2 BJolitz Jolix00
cd /var/www/unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/386BSD-0.1
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs import -m “386BSD 0.1” Net2 BJolitz Jolix01
cd /var/www/unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/NetBSD-0.8
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs import -m “NetBSD 0.8” Net2 NetBSD NetBSD08
cd /var/www/unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/NetBSD-0.9
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs import -m “NetBSD 0.9” Net2 NetBSD NetBSD09 

From what I saw the more the directories align, the better, so I moved all the i386 and other platform stuff into arch directories to better match NetBSD 0.9 …

I also setup src2html to browse various levels, it’s great for quickly finding things that may have moved… It’s here.

Now I just have to see about doing ‘forks’ in CVS and adding in the 4.4 lite stuff.

Research Unix v7 on the PDP-11

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Boot
: hp(0,0)unix
mem = 2020544
# RESTRICTED RIGHTS: USE, DUPLICATION, OR DISCLOSURE
IS SUBJECT TO RESTRICTIONS STATED IN YOUR CONTRACT WITH
WESTERN ELECTRIC COMPANY, INC.
WED DEC 31 19:02:48 EST 1969

login: root
Password:
You have mail.
#

Wee that was fun. I installed it from tape, so… it was a a bit more challenging. But luckily with all the SIMH & TUHS resources I was able to extract out the setup guide and step through it for the most part.

I’ve documented the steps here, and I even uploaded a tape image to sourceforge.

I’m trying to work out installing 1 BSD, as it was just a collection of userland stuff for Unix v7, however I’m having some issues with floatingpoint, but I have some hopes I can sort my way through it.

I have some hopes of being able to get a 1 BSD & 2 BSD machine up in SIMH… These are the versions that were not full operating system, just supplements to Unix v7 from what I can tell.

Some notes on UnixWare

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A long while back, I got this UnixWare 7 kit on ebay.. So I figured it was as good a time as any other to install it and give it a whirl…

Now one cool thing is that 7.1 will install on Virtual PC 2007, and runs quite nice.. The one trick is to not give it too much memory. I found that 1GB of ram made it run horribly, while 256MB had it running great.

Another weird thing is that if you suspend the VM for any reason, the network will stop working. The only fix is to reboot the VM. Also

Also the C compiler, while not the most feature rich one out there is amazingly fast.. It builds Quake in around 5 seconds, once all the source is ‘fixed’. Also if you want to build any X11 programs, be sure to install the linux compatibility, or have a handy source of X11 headers to grab, as for some reason my UW7 didn’t include them.. ?

So yes, with a bunch of tweaks from the SUN source version of QuakeWorld, here it is:

Quake-on-UnixWare

Quake 1 for UnixWare 7.

And naturally it’ll run Dungeon as well with some f2c magic. The only caveat is that you can’t build the libf2c with any optimizations or it’ll crash or give really strange results….

Dungeon 2.5.6 on UnixWare

Dungeon 2.5.6 on UnixWare

Dungeon 2.5.6 on UnixWare.

Other then that, UnixWare is just another SYSV wrapped up in CDE. But I do recall it being used in the call center world, in conjunction with some seriously old unix machines (think NCR 386!), mostly doing voicemail and other stuff. I think it was the UnixWare 2.x stuff that all included that PC emulation software that could run Windows with the Netware client.. OH the horrors of someone loading up that and lotus notes to check mail on the VM server.. people did notice!!!!!!

I’m not sure if people still use UnixWare with Avaya G3’s anymore.. I know the G3’s were busy moving to linux, but I don’t know about all the support stuff, so for all I know CMS & friends still run on Solaris/UnixWare.

It’s a shame UnixWare got a bad rep from the SCO lawsuits, as it’s a pretty fast & responsive Unix, and too bad they never did get it ported to the Itanium & x64. I mean it’s still not too late, but I suspect the required investment to make it happen is just too great.