A/UX request

[ChristTrekker]

A rather large one, but I'm hoping someone here will be willing to help out.

I'd like to try to do some ports to A/UX, but my own system is still in a heap awaiting free time at home to get to it. Meanwhile, my lunch hours are spent idly reading the news and such. Is anyone willing to give me an account on his A/UX system to do some coding until my own is back up and running again?

 

[paws]

What are you porting?

 

[ChristTrekker]

What are you porting?

I'd love to get a newer version of gcc working, and I was working on pkgsrc infrastructure when my last A/UX box died.

 

[paws]

Interesting.

I've got a Quadra 700 that I'm putting A/UX on, but the ETA on that is a bit loose... and it's only got 8 megabytes of RAM. Not sure it'll be remotely usable.

Don't hold your breath, but I might be able to get a WGS95. There's a guy giving one away.. I'll only take it if he has some memory for it and I can only leave it on for any length of time if it's not too noisy..

 

[pee-air]

I'm assuming you'll want a root account? I'll give you a root account on my Q700 if you want. Although the specs of the machine are rather limited: 25MHz 68040; 20 megabytes of RAM; no SSH as of yet, so you'll have to telnet to it -- or install SSH on it. [] ]'>

Let me know if you're interested. And which version of A/UX you want. I'll move it outside my firewall and register with DynDNS if you are.

 

[ChristTrekker]

I'm assuming you'll want a root account? I'll give you a root account on my Q700 if you want. Although the specs of the machine are rather limited: 25MHz 68040; 20 megabytes of RAM; no SSH as of yet, so you'll have to telnet to it -- or install SSH on it. [] ]'>
Let me know if you're interested. And which version of A/UX you want. I'll move it outside my firewall and register with DynDNS if you are.

Root would be handy, but probably not absolutely necessary—unless header files were borked I can probably work out of a home dir. We'll have to see. A Q700 is a good box, and 20 MiB isn't bad either. How much disk do you have? Working with pkgsrc takes a fair bit.

 

[beachycove]

Interesting.
... I can only leave it on for any length of time if it's not too noisy..

[He repeats:] Just change the fan. The jet effect was meant to counteract the effect of having six internal drives, nubus cards galore, etc. etc. With a smaller fan, the machine runs just fine and with a lovely low rumble (so long as such heat-generating add-ons are not added in, anyway).

I have also removed some nubus slot covers in mine in order to improve the air circulation. Works wonders.

 

[pee-air]

Root would be handy, but probably not absolutely necessary—unless header files were borked I can probably work out of a home dir. We'll have to see. A Q700 is a good box, and 20 MiB isn't bad either. How much disk do you have? Working with pkgsrc takes a fair bit.

I actually just swapped the 2 gig drive out for a nine gig drive. So I'm in the process of reinstalling. Should be done sometime today.

 

[paws]

[He repeats:] Just change the fan.

Intriguing.

Only problem is the guy can't be bothered to open it and check for RAM and disks, so I could theoretically get a WGS95 with a 500MB HD and 4MB RAM. So basically yet another old computer to throw money at that I might have to give away (or chuck) when I have to move next year.

 

[pee-air]

Seems I've run into a bit of a snag with getting my Q700 up and running. See this thread. This may have to wait until I can get a new hard drive. Unless you can make do with a lowly two gigabyte drive -- the only working drive I have available at the moment.

 

[ChristTrekker]

Seems I've run into a bit of a snag with getting my Q700 up and running. See this thread. This may have to wait until I can get a new hard drive. Unless you can make do with a lowly two gigabyte drive -- the only working drive I have available at the moment.

Checking on the space requirements of pkgsrc, 2GB is fine, as long as you don't intend on putting lots of other stuff on the drive. (Older Unices like A/UX don't require much space for a "base" install.) The unpacked source files are only 288M, which should leave plenty of space for work files. I really appreciate all the effort you're throwing into this.

 

[pee-air]

Okay, I have A/UX 3.1.1 up and running on my Quadra 700 again. It's running on the little two gigabyte drive for now. But I'll change that as soon as I get a larger drive that I can format in Mac OS.

Here's a screenshot of a telnet session to the A/UX box. I really need to get ssh installed on there.

 

[beachycove]

Okay, I have A/UX 3.1.1 up and running on my Quadra 700 again. It's running on the little two gigabyte drive for now. But I'll change that as soon as I get a larger drive that I can format in Mac OS.

2 GB is, as I recall, the maximum drive size under A/UX.

 

[pee-air]

2 GB is, as I recall, the maximum drive size under A/UX.

I think I read something somewhere about this. I think you're supposed to limit / to two gigabytes or less, but you can add larger partitions to /. So I could have a two gigabyte / and a four gigabyte /users partition, for example. And if I'm not mistaken, the two gigabyte limit for / is not a hard limit. If I recall correctly, it's just advised to keep the / below two gigabytes to avoid confusing the very old version of fsck that is included with A/UX. Of course, I could have this totally ass-backwards; I'm going from memory and don't even remember where I read it at the moment.

Edit: I found where I read it. It's in the A/UX 3.1 Update Readme file. I'll quote the relevant portion below and provide a link to the complete document here.

When the Apple Workgroup Server 95 starts up, the fsck command is run from the A/UX Startup application. When the fsck command is run from the A/UX Startup application, it cannot check a file system larger than 2 GB. Therefore, limit the size of your root file system to 2,097,151 KB so that the root file system can be checked at system startup. Once A/UX is running, the fsck command can check file systems as large as 4 GB.

 

[ChristTrekker]

Hey paws, how is your install going?

 

[paws]

I've got a clean A/UX 3.01 on my Quadra 700. I can't remember the disk size, and it only has 8MB of RAM at the moment.

I'm busy finishing an essay, nudge me again after the weekend.