Re: SunOS 4 in 2024 - TUHS

13 Mar 2024

TME - most recently https://osdn.net/projects/nme/ - in theory does what
you want.  Its setup and use is a bit idiosyncratic, and I have found that
it is unhappy running on OSs other than NetBSD, but if you get it running
it just works.  I've used it to set up installations of SunOS 3 and 4 on
sun2, sun3, and sun4 architectures.

-Henry

On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:49, &lt;earl(a)baugh.org&gt; wrote:

...
  I’m looking for a “Sun OS 3.5” emulation running where
I can attach a SCSI
 emulator to it and get the full OS installed.
 I’ve got tape images but I haven’t found the process to emulate how it
 used to work.

 From the initial boot prompt, you extracted them to the “swap partition”
 and then started the install and it would prompt you for the next tape when
 needed.
 So, I guess we’d need an emulated tape or something, etc.    I have all
 the tar’s (all the way back to Sun OS 1 or so) but have been frustrated
 trying to make some progress.

 Earl

 On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:31 PM, Henry Bent &lt;henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

 On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn &lt;will.senn(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

  On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote:

 Hi all,

 I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5,
 seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a
 modern computing environment.  I know that TUHS isn't really the right
 place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is?  I've made
 significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there -
 for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute
 to a community if one exists.  Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?

 -Henry

 Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent...

 I recently saw that Solaris 11.4 SRU66 was released and had a yearning to
 see how things in Solaris land were doing (can't stand Gnome so
 OpenIndiana's a bust)... but with Oracle's Solaris, it's a mess at least
 for hobbyists (only get release patches, so I'm guessing the most up to
 date 'release' was 11.4 in 2018). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I
 thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM,
 turns out things have come a long way on that front:

 https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/

 OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I could
 just remember how commands work on SunOS :).

 Thanks Will!  You may also be interested in
 https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another
 resource about running SunOS 4 in QEMU.  I have considered moving my setup
 to QEMU, especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image
 since I am using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running
 these things on the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind.

 -Henry