[TUHS] SunOS 4 in 2024

[Henry Bent]

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, <earl at baugh.org> 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 <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> 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
>
>
>
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