Re: SunOS 4 in 2024 - TUHS

13 Mar 2024

The emulation of proper tape drive records is present in TME - see this
fragment from the setup file that I have to install SunOS 2:

## power up the machine:
##
# uncomment this line to automatically power up the machine when
# tmesh starts:
#
command tape0 load sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/01 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/02
sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/03 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/04 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/05
sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/06 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/07 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/08
sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/09 sunos-2.0-sun2/tape1/10
command mainbus0 power up

Let me know if you need more of a walkthrough, I'd have to get NetBSD
running in a VM as I haven't worked with this in a long time, but I'm sure
it still works.

-Henry

On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 18:04, &lt;earl(a)baugh.org&gt; wrote:

...
  I had old instructions to do this but getting TME
running was a bit
 quirky.  And the package had lost most of it’s support.
 (I did just go out and find that some folks have somewhat resurrected it…)

 I have the install manual for 3.5 (

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.5/800-2089-10A_Release_3.5_Manual_…
 )
 And did find this about TME Now ( https://pkgsrc.se/wip/tme )
 And these instructions (which from the link before this page indicated as
 of 2019 they still worked
 http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/sun3-150-nbsd.html )

 That would get me “close” if I could somehow write to an emulated SCSI
 device.. or the SD card that supported it… etc.   Blue SCSI, Green SCSI, Pi
 SCSI, etc. I don’t care which (would prefer something that would let me use
 a “real” drive… SSD or similar is fine… rather than SD card).  I do have an
 image that gets me “somewhat” booting with a SCSI2SD but the additional
 drive mounts are wrong in the fstab/mtab so I can’t get it fully to boot….

 If I can figure out the process, I’ll make images and share them (for all
 the early Sun OS’s) and write up a web page and post it to archive.org so
 nobody has to go thru this again :-)

 Earl

 On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:56 PM, Henry Bent &lt;henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

 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