A/UX not launching on IIsi

[posixcompliant]

Hello, *NIX friends!

I have a IIsi that I'm trying to get set up with A/UX. This is my first earnest attempt running A/UX on hardware, so I'll preface this all by saying that it's possible I'm missing something obvious. I'm using the "AUX_3_1_1GB_Use_In_Shoebill" image from this page with my BlueSCSI.

My machine will boot into System 7 just fine, and then starts running the A/UX loader. While the progress bar is going, it will briefly display "Launching..." before cutting to a full grey screen, after which the system seems to hang up. In looking at screen captures of other folks booting A/UX, there appears to be a brief flash of the same grey screen there before proceeding through the rest of the stages in the loading screen, but never anything that lasts more than a split-second from what I've seen.

This same IIsi is running vanilla System 7.0.1 without issue. Removing the network card and attempting to boot A/UX will throw a different error about not having an FPU, so this doesn't seem to be the result of a badly-seated FPU or network card. Testing this also allowed me to confirm that if I error out of the A/UX boot process without an FPU, I'm able to use the 7.0.1 boot system from that Use_In_Shoebill image as-normal.

I'm using the BMOW sync-inator for video output to a VGA monitor, but my understanding is that it only adjusts sync signals and shouldn't really impact the actual video signal, so I don't think that it's hitting some weird state where it's proceeding through the boot process but no longer displaying, although I don't have any way of confirming this with another display method at the moment.

Anyway, if anyway A/UX experts have thoughts on this, I'm all ears! Especially curious to hear from anyone who regularly uses A/UX with a IIsi in case there are any known config gotchas for that machine. Closer than I've ever been yet still so far away :')

 

[halkyardo]

Yeah, that grey screen is (I'm pretty sure) the point at which A/UX probes for expansion cards and reinitialises the video driver - A/UX does some truly cursed shenanigans in the video department, emulating a subset of Mac OS ROM traps to allow any video card's ROM to run unmodified. In my IIfx I have one NuBus video card that doesn't play nice with A/UX and will sometimes cause a hang at this point.

Presumably you don't have any aftermarket video cards in your IIsi, but what kind of ethernet card have you got in there?

One thing that might be worth investigating is seeing if there's any output on the serial console (modem port, 9600 8N1) that might help explain what's going on. If there isn't, hit the interrupt button and it should dump you into a rudimentary debugger. If you add -s to the launch command line in the A/UX launcher (hit Command-. while in the launcher, then choose Preferences->Booting from the menu bar) that will enable debug symbols that might reveal more clues.

 

[cheesestraws]

Can you boot the A/UX installer from CD? I'd advise against using pre-made images generally (though I don't know anything about the specific image you're using). The A/UX installer has a reputation for fearsomeness but it really doesn't deserve it - if you know what a disk partition is, you'll be fine. There's a walkthrough of the installer here: https://aux-penelope.com/aux_3.0.htm

I'll also note that A/UX is much pickier about hardware in general than MacOS - not just in terms of what it supports, but the fact that what's there needs to work properly. For example: I had an issue with a SCSI device that turned out just not to be initialising as quickly as A/UX wanted it to. Fine under MacOS, not under A/UX. I doubt this is precisely your problem here - I've not heard of anyone having A/UX compatibility issues with BlueSCSI - but other marginal hardware might be affecting it.

 

[posixcompliant]

@halkyardo thanks for the debug tips, I'll look into that! I've got an Asante MacCon that I pulled from an SE/30 - it's in good-enough working order that Asante's troubleshooter utility recognizes the card under 7.0.1. I have yet to successfully connect to the internet with it, but I think that's more likely an OS/driver config problem - it does seem to be getting packets per the troubleshooter util.

@cheesestraws I don't have a SCSI CD drive yet, but I've been strongly considering it since I've been having trouble with all the prebuilt images I've tried. If I end up banging my head on the wall with this too much longer I'll probably cave and grab an Apple CD 300 off the 'Bay.

 

[cheesestraws]

I don't have a SCSI CD drive yet, but I've been strongly considering it

I'm fairly sure your SCSI thing ought to do CD drive emulation - have a look at its docs. If so, you can install just from the ISO (try dumping it on the SD card as CD3.iso or something). At least, this is how I always do it - I don't think I've used a physical CD for this for years at this point!

 

[robin-fo]

The Shoebill image should usually be alright.. How long did you wait with the grey screen? I wonder if it‘s doing a newconfig in the background which usually takes a few minutes.

 

[Reasons.]

I'm fairly sure your SCSI thing ought to do CD drive emulation - have a look at its docs. If so, you can install just from the ISO (try dumping it on the SD card as CD3.iso or something). At least, this is how I always do it - I don't think I've used a physical CD for this for years at this point!

You can also do a folder full of images with an name like "CD[x]" (where [x] is whatever SCSI ID you want the drive to be at). The BlueSCSI (or ZuluSCSI) will mount the first image alphabetically on bootup and then subsequent images as you eject the previous one. Either approach works fine, but the folder's easier if you have a lot of SCSI devices or abhor desktop clutter.

 

[cgp]

Another datapoint here: I have a IIci with ROMinator II (which is based on the IIsi ROM) that won't launch A/UX 3.1, but it's perfectlyhappy with the stock ROM. I've never bothered to debug this, but I suspect it may be related to the RAM configuration.

 

[Mk.558]

A/UX 3.0 will be sluggish on a IIsi. You're better off trying A/UX 2.0.1. A BlueSCSI is kind of ideal because A/UX has a rocky history with stability and can corrupt itself.

Even on a IIci A/UX 3.0 ... how can I say this: It feels a bit like 7.6.1 almost Mac OS 8 on a IIci. The equivalent for a IIsi would be also 7.6.1. You can feel the drag and A/UX tends to have issues with folders with a lot of items in it (takes forever to load even a folder with ~150 items in it).

A/UX 3.0 is best used on a fast 68040, like a Quadra 900 or 950.

 

[nathall]

Agree with Mk.558. I run 2.0.1 on the IIsi and stick with the IIfx for 3.1.1.

That said, is the “Shoebill” image a pre-built/configured/installed image? (EDIT: Ah yes, I see you mentioned it is.) I am not familiar with what Shoebill is, but I imagine this is your problem. The moment you describe is when A/UX takes full control of the video subsystem. A hang/crash at this point means A/UX can’t talk to this system in any meaningful way.

Generally speaking, the kernel is machine specific and needs to be built for the machine it is running on. This is especially the case with the IIsi and its unique onboard video that uses actual RAM for VRAM.

You MIGHT be able to get around this with this Shoebill image by using a NuBus video card, but you’d have to remove your Ethernet card. The real solution though would be to do a clean install and let the kernel build itself for the IIsi hardware.

 

[robin-fo]

Shoebill

was the first Mac emulator which supported A/UX

 

[posixcompliant]

Ahh thanks @nathall, very insightful - makes a ton of sense. I figured something video/hardware related was a leading possibility but didn't have the expertise to know how idiosyncratic the IIsi is in terms of the kernel. From everyone's suggestions, I'm going to try installing A/UX 2.0.1 using my BlueSCSI and see how I get along.

Thank you everyone for the feedback! This is really helping me to fill in a lot of the gaps in my knowledge, very much looking forward to gaining more hands-on experience with A/UX soon

sidenote: I've got an A/UX-compatible SCSI CD drive on the way, but in the event that I don't end up needing it I'm still excited to play The Manhole from my original CD-ROM (probably haven't spun it up in 20+ years)

 

[Cory5412]

Maybe not the most useful ever, but:

idly: I ran A/UX 3.1 (the AWGS95 build, even) on a IIsi back in the day and it was "fine" - If you have enough RAM for it and some patience and you want to run A/UX 3.x, I don't see why not. (It's not like you need to make money on whatever it is you're setting up after all, it's just for fun and we know this might not be a "prototypical" configuration.)

(TBH I'm the kind of person who'd run 7.6.1 on a IIsi as well, for the logistical convenience of it's better handling of larger filesystems and network shares, even at the expense of some speed, but that's very much a personal and ecosystem question, along with, kinda depending on what you want to be doing, and most of what I do on my old Macs doesn't rely on responsiveness per se.)

One thing that might be a blocker: how much RAM do you have? A/UX 3.0 presumes a "fairly" high amount, I think I ran it with like 33ish megs of ram (1+slots or am I misremembering?), 17 is probably on the lower line of what you'd really want to deal with.

As you've got an FPU this "should" work, but I agree with everyone else, try installing it off the CD image rather than using a prebuilt emulator.

Shoebill is if I remember right a 68k emulator optimized specifically for running A/UX, so the image probably makes some presumptions about what hardware is available based on a default configuration there. (does a/ux have a verbose bootup mode? that might show you where it's getting stuck, although whether that's useful info or repairable with what you have is perhaps an open question.)

 

[Mk.558]

Shoebill IMO is okay. It's "alright". It's what I would recommend to dabble with A/UX 1.1.1 before you conclude "yeap, this wasn't worth installing" and move on. Shoebill can't network out (unlike QEMU-aux) and cannot boot Mac OS itself: it bootstraps itself directly into A/UX mode.

On a real machine, the special snowflake is A/UX 2.0. It's moderately interesting, but the BlueSCSI's ability to dup images and recover them from when A/UX inevitably nukes itself is convenient, as is the ability to present multiple different types of media formats as real disks (i.e. installing from the A/UX CD back on to the HDD image of the BlueSCSI). If you do this, I recommend making a copy of the image immediately post install because invariably it'll nuke itself somehow.

As for A/UX 3.0, I'd recommend considering the special QEMU-aux build. It boots 7.0.1 just fine and has a number of enhancements specific to A/UX. Although it doesn't handle the lower A/UX versions, it is definitely the way to go for fooling around with A/UX in an emulation environment.

Memory is interesting. On my IIci, I have 64MiB of RAM, but A/UX 2.0 seems to only bother with 16. Here's A/UX 3.0 (not 3.1 or 3.1.1 or whatever) running with a Netatalk 2.3.2 file server:



You generally don't need to worry about kernels too much. If a kernel is not compatible upon boot (i.e. you built it on a IIcx and now you want to use the HDD on a IIfx) it'll compile a new kernel itself. You'll probably have to recompile the kernel yourself anyways if it doesn't recognize your Ethernet card the first time, or if you want to add NFS support or other file systems it can recognize.

If you are installing A/UX 2.0, I seriously recommend looking at the manuals for it, there's a whole bunch of them at bitsavers.org's archive, or whatever MrFarenheit grabbed from there and threw up on MG. A/UX 2.0.1 does not use the same installation process as A/UX 2.0 but it's very similar. You may want to peek at those manuals if you intend to go deeper into A/UX.

 

[Cory5412]

A/UX 2.0 seems to only bother with 16.

does anything else show up if you run top or ps or whatever?

My understanding is that the UNIX environment will use all the RAM you can give it and the default RAM for the Mac environment is perhaps a little low, or maybe dependent on what's available the first time you install it, and maybe configurable?

(But this may only apply to 3.0, IDK anything about 1.x or 2.x, apologies if this is wrong!)

If I remember right, the way Apple presented it, the selling point for A/UX is that your "real work" was in UNIX and the value add of running it on a Mac was that you could get a couple Mac apps on the side, so for a system hypothetically running 64+ megs of RAM in 1990 or so, you probably only "need" 8-16 megs for whatever you're doing on the Mac side of things.

(We of course know that most of the selling point was checking a box so Macs were eligible for more types of gov/grant funding.)

 

[zigzagjoe]

Yes, you can change the memory allocated to the Mac environment. I want to say it's in the Memory control panel, even.

 

[falecore]

Agree with Mk.558. I run 2.0.1 on the IIsi and stick with the IIfx for 3.1.1.

That said, is the “Shoebill” image a pre-built/configured/installed image? (EDIT: Ah yes, I see you mentioned it is.) I am not familiar with what Shoebill is, but I imagine this is your problem. The moment you describe is when A/UX takes full control of the video subsystem. A hang/crash at this point means A/UX can’t talk to this system in any meaningful way.

Generally speaking, the kernel is machine specific and needs to be built for the machine it is running on. This is especially the case with the IIsi and its unique onboard video that uses actual RAM for VRAM.

You MIGHT be able to get around this with this Shoebill image by using a NuBus video card, but you’d have to remove your Ethernet card. The real solution though would be to do a clean install and let the kernel build itself for the IIsi hardware.

FWIW, I have been able to get the shoebill image to run on an SE/30 and Quadra 950.

 

[Mk.558]

$ top doesn't exist on A/UX 2.0.



Memory control panel doesn't exist either.

However I'm pretty sure A/UX 2.0 is 32-bit capable just fine. There's 24 bit and 32 bit versions of CommandShell, but I don't know much else.

 

[Mk.558]

Here's A/UX 3.0 by the way, this is probably what folks might have been thinking of. $ top doesn't work in A/UX 3.0 either.

edit: weird that Largest Unused Block isn't showing up there, must have grabbed it mid-frame. Right now it's floating between 11,200 and 11,202K. Memory allocated to the virtual machine is 128MB.

 

[cgp]

... $ top doesn't work in A/UX 3.0 either.

Get top-3.3 from https://www.aux-penelope.com/jagubox/ .. it's fine.