ChristTrekker
Well-known member
What would be the coolest development you can imagine happening regarding A/UX? What's on your A/UX wishlist?
I've always wondered why no one has at least made a token crack at running A/UX binaries on NetBSD. A/UX is obscure, sure, but no worse than any number of other things NetBSD developers have fiddled with.Another thing which might be cool is if someone found a way to run A/UX services such as AppleShare and System 7.0.1 on top of other OSes such as NetBSD with COMPAT_SVR4...
I've never tried the R6 that's floating around the 'net. I assume from your comment that it needs to be compiled and is not an easy process. Since we don't have shared memory, small widget toolkits are a must. I think I've said it before, but I'd love to see FLTK ported.A good implementation of X11R6 (and Motif and/or Xaw) so that we can port more things to it. By good I mean easy to install and pre-built.
Being stuck at gcc 2.7 stinks. Even 2.95 would be great. Someone once sent me a 3.x binary but I couldn't get it to work. A/UX support was dropped in 3.0 or 3.1, but I'd be thrilled with that.Hmmm... A modern toolchain which could bootstrap modern software would be nice!
Yes! I'm not sure I've ever looked into why DHCP doesn't work.Using Apple OS 7.1 instead of 7.01, DHCP support.
What is required to do this sort of thing? Just implement A/UX versions of system calls? Even if you did this, only the Unix apps would work, not the Mac/hybrid ones. Right?I've always wondered why no one has at least made a token crack at running A/UX binaries on NetBSD. A/UX is obscure, sure, but no worse than any number of other things NetBSD developers have fiddled with.
The Mac environment itself as I recall (do keep in mind that I may be on crack, it's been the better part of a decade since I fiddled with A/UX) ran as a UNIX app on A/UX. It undoubtedly had some special kernel support that might be non-trivial to duplicate, but you need to walk before you can run. If you could get support for A/UX command-line binaries working then you'd at least have a start.What is required to do this sort of thing? Just implement A/UX versions of system calls? Even if you did this, only the Unix apps would work, not the Mac/hybrid ones. Right?I've always wondered why no one has at least made a token crack at running A/UX binaries on NetBSD. A/UX is obscure, sure, but no worse than any number of other things NetBSD developers have fiddled with.
Not to be a buzzkill, but... there was so little "hybrid" software written for A/UX it gets a bit difficult to see what the advantage of "NouveAUX" would really be over just running BasiliskII on top of the modern UNIXoid of your choice. Was A/UX ever used for anything much "unique" beyond Appleshare serving on Ethernet networks? (In this day and age running NetaTalk would be a far better choice than running ancient unobtanium A/UX Appleshare Pro binaries.)My own wish is that Steve J would suffer a whack to his head that made him think opening the Sys 7.1, ROM, and A/UX glue code to be a great idea. Then we could implement "NouveAUX" on top of NetBSD. With a m68k emul layer, you could run it on modern processors, even. Wouldn't apps from the early 90s just scream running at today's speeds?
I guess I don't understand the distinction, because A/UX really was little more than a Mac OS emulator (ala native-CPU BasiliskII) running full screen on a UNIX box. (Again my memory is fuzzy, but I seem to recall actually being able to kill the MacOS process via a telnet window just like any other process.) If you hacked BasiliskII/SheepShaver/whatever so it ran full screen with your Classic Mac OS apps "natively" while letting UNIX programs poke through (either in Commando-style terminal windows or something more elaborate like my X11 composting suggestion) it seems to me like you've essentially achieved the same thing.My "goal" is to have a modern Unix environment capable of running my favorite old classic Mac OS apps "natively", not windowed or with a different UI like in an emulated environment...
Being able to distributing the MacOS support pieces for free is a *whole other story*. (No, it's never going to happen. If you want a free OS then I guess your best approach would be to try to do something with the Executor code base and either integrate it more seamlessly with X11 or use the reverse-engineered Toolbox as your only GUI on a bare framebuffer.) I was just spitballing technical approaches you could try by harvesting pieces from the existing (dead and impossible to get a proper license for) binary code base.That's why I think you'd need the code for those "glue" APIs and the ROMs. I don't know if using a "binary blob" ROM would be possible, if Apple would even allow copies to be distributed gratis. You'd have to implement the Toolbox.
My "goal" amounts to doing A/UX "one better". In it's day, it was Unix with a Mac face. Mac OS was the primary environment. Sure, you could run X apps with MacX, but they were always second-class citizens. If you stayed in the Mac environment, you could use it just like a Mac, but A/UX gave you the ability to keep your machine running if some bad app killed your Finder instead of rebooting the machine.It's a pipe dream, I know…
Aaah. Therein lies my confusion. I thought your goal was to have something that really was essentially "like A/UX but with more modern tinkertoys." A/UX *really* didn't integrate MacOS with UNIX in the way you're envisioning.I want the Mac apps to behave just like native apps. It would technically still be emulation, I believe, as you'd have several intermediate layers interpreting function calls to that of the native system, but it would be the best emulation ever...
I've been surprised by the fact that no one's done much hacking with "Classic". I was reasonably sure, for instance, that within a few months some dedicated soul would devote themselves to reverse-engineering and forklifting Classic support from Tiger to work on PPC Leopard. (From what I know of how "Classic" is implemented it seems like it should be possible to do it.) Perhaps it was just so painfully obvious that Leopard on PPC sucked that it turned off anyone who might have the knowhow to bother.SheepShaver: Hmmmm, that's an interesting idea, too!