On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:16 PM, Henry Bent
<
henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello all,
I have a distribution of SVR2 on the PDP-11 that I have managed to get
booting
into the initial root dump, but it is not clear to me how to
proceed from there to format a /usr filesystem and setup for multi-user.
...
I haven't managed to find any installation manuals or the like on
Bitsavers,
and I can't even manage to find a listing in the source of the
expected disk partitions/sizes. I feel very much like I am stumbling in the
dark here and would appreciate any pointers to how to proceed. Thanks!
-Henry
First off I didn't know SVR2 made it to the PDP-11, I thought they cut it
off after the initial System V release, is what you have AT&T or some
derivative version?
Second, this is the setup instructions for DEC processors for the initial
release of System V which included the PDP-11/70:
https://archive.org/details/unix-system-administrators-guide-5-0/04%20Setti…
Additionally, here is the Operator's Guide which details bootstrapping the
system among other things:
https://archive.org/details/unix-system-operators-guide-release-5-0/mode/2up
While not SVR2, hopefully the differences are minimal enough that you can
use those. Good luck!
Also regarding finding more documentation, sadly AT&T stripped out the
/usr/doc materials with System V, so these critical pieces of documentation
actually can't be found in a typical system distribution, rather, you had
to get the paper copies. I'm not aware of any discovery of TROFF sources
for any of this stuff past System III, I do have it on my long-term list to
eventually synthesize copies of said documents from available scans so they
can be more easily diff'd, but my current focus is much, much earlier.
Thank you, this is a wonderful starting point. I often forget that
sometimes
will have documentation that is not duplicated in
other sources, so this is a welcome reminder. I'll read through all of
this and report back.
-Henry