Greetings,
What's the canonical source for patches to 2.9BSD and 2.11BSD?
I see we have 2.11BSD patch 469 dated last month in the archive. Where does
it come from? Has anybody climbed the hill to import all the patches into a
git repo? I've found some mirrors, but moe.2bsd.org has been down for me
for ages... How does Warren keep things up to date?
I also have a (maybe faulty) memory of a similar series of patches to
2.9BSD because it was the last BSD to support non-split I&D space machines.
yet a quick google search turns up nothing other than a set of patches
dated August 1985 (also in our archive) and some changes for variants of
hardware (pro, mscp). Is that it?
Warner
I've assembled some notes from old manuals and other sources
on the formats used for on-disk file systems through the
Seventh Edition:
http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~norman/old-unix/old-fs.html
Additional notes, comments on style, and whatnot are welcome.
(It may be sensible to send anything in the last two categories
directly to me, rather than to the whole list.)
Is it okay for me to ask a question about Linux that's from '91~'92?
Does anyone happen to have copies of H.J. Lu's Bootable Root and the
associated Linux Base System disk images from the early '90s?
I've managed to find a copy of 0.98.pl5-31 bootable root disk. But I
can't find any base disks to go along with it.
The files used to be on tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/GCC in rootdisk and
basedisk subdirectories.
Unfortunately all of the mirrors I'm finding of tsx-11 are newer, have
the basedisk directories, but no image files there in.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
What's the current status of net/2?
I ask because I have a FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 CVS repo that I'd like to make
available. Some of the files in it are encumbered, though, and the
University of California has communicated that fact. But what does that
actually mean now that V7 has been released and that's what the files were
based on? Are they no longer encumbered?
Warner
I've done some research for a friend about when the reboot() system call
was added, and how it related to the sync, sync, sync dance.
https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/07/when-unix-learned-to-reboot2.html
may be of interest. Please do let me know if I've gotten something wrong...
Warner
One of the things that I've noticed in my explorations into the H.J. Lu
bootable root disks is that some of them predate the /sbin split in Linux.
One of them has exactly one file in /sbin and other commands spread
across /bin, /usr/bin, and /etc. The single file in /sbin is sln.
To me, this makes it fairly self evident that /sbin was originally for
statically linked binaries. At least in Linux.
Does anyone have any history of /sbin from other traditional Unixes?
I'd be quite interested in learning more.
I also noticed that (at least) one of the early versions of the H.J. Lu
disks had root's home directory in /usr/root.
I seem to recall that one version used an atypical of /users vs /usr.
Which as I understand it, goes back to the original / vs /usr split in
Unix, before /home became a thing.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
All,
So... I've moved on from v7 to 2.11bsd - shucks, vi and tar and co. just
work there and everything else seems to be similar enough for what I'm
interested in anyway. So yay, I won't be pestering y'all about vi
anymore :). One the other hand, now I'm interested in printing the docs.
2.11bsd comes with docs in, of all places, /usr/doc. In there are
makefiles for making the docs - ok, make nroff will make ascii docs, and
troff will make troff? docs using Ossana's 'original' troff. So, after
adding -t to it so it didn't complain about 'typesetter busy', I got no
errors. I mounted a tape, tar'ed my .out file and untar'ed it on my
macbook (did it for the nroff and troff output). Then I hit the first
snag, groff -Tps -ms troff.out > whatever.ps resulted in cannot adjust
line and cannot break line errors and groff -Tps -ms nroff.out >
whatever.ps resulted in a bunch of double vision. I seem to recall doing
this in v6 and it working ok (at least for nroff).
My questions:
1. Is there a troff to postcript conversion utility present in a stock
2.11 system (or even patch level 4xx system)?
2. Is there a way to build postscript directly on the system?
3. Is there an alternative modern way to get to ps or pdf output from
the nroff/troff that 2.11 has?
I'm still digging into the nroff stuff as that may be just minor diffs
between ancient nroff macros and "modern" macros or even just errors
(.sp -2 rather than .sp or .sp -1, .in -2 instead of .in +2), etc.
Although, the files display ok in 2.11bsd using nroff -ms nroff.out...
Thanks,
Will
--
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
> From: Paul Guertin
> I teach math in college ... Sometimes, during an exam, a student who
> forgot to bring their calculator will ask if they can borrow mine I
> always say "sure, but you'll regret it" and hand them the calculator
> After wasting one or two minutes, they give it back
Maybe I'm being clueless/over-asking, but to me it's appalling that any
college student (at least all who have _any_ math requirement at all; not sure
how many that is) doesn't know how an RPN calculator works. It's not exactly
rocket science, and any reasonably intelligent high-schooler should get it
extremely quickly; just tell them it's just a representational thing, number
number operator instead of number operator number. I know it's not a key
intellectual skill, but it does seem to me to be part of comon intellectual
heritage that everyone should know, like musical scales or poetry
rhyming. Have you ever considered taking two minutes (literally!) to cover it
briefly, just 'someone tried to borrow my RPN calculator, here's the basic
idea of how they work'?
Noel
