pee-air
Well-known member
Installed A/UX 3.0.1 on my Quadra 700 today. Everything went pretty smoothly once I got my Q700 ready for the install. I used a hard drive that I pulled from an old SGI box, so I had to fiddle with some jumpers. I also had to pull my Rasterops Paintboard Prism GT card out.
I had a couple of problems initially. Once I burned the iso to a CD-R and wrote the boot image to a flopy disk, I encountered an odd problem. The floppy disk booted fine and located the CDROM drive. It began loading from the CD-R no problem. But it gave me a strange message in the upper left hand corner of the screen: Panic: no root file system. I couldn't figure out what the problem was, but after a half dozen reboots it just worked.
I was worried that my Pioneer 12x CDROM drive would not work, as it will not work with Mac OS without installing some proprietary drivers. But I guess that doesn't really matter with A/UX because it bypasses the Macintosh Toolbox and works directly with the drive. Anyway, the CDROM drive just worked.
I was also worried that the CD-R that I burned the iso to might cause some problems. I read several posts that said that the iso should be burned at the slowest speed possible. I burned my iso at 40x. I didn't have any problems with the CD-R that I burned. It worked flawlessly.
Now that I have A/UX installed, I don't quite know what to do with it. I've been spending the last few hours trying to install stuff on it. So far I've managed to install VIM, wget, and gzip. Installing software in A/UX is not as simple and straightforward as it is in Linux or NetBSD. It requires a fair bit of tinkering. And the directories are something that I'm not at all used to -- I'm not used to /users versus /home, among other things.
Other than that, the X11 environment in A/UX is surprisingly quick on a 25MHz Quadra 700. It feels much more responsive than the X11 environment in Linux or NetBSD on a 68K machine. MacX is dog slow though. But I don't care, as I don't plan on running Mac OS aplications on this machine anyway. So I'll just stick with X11 or the basic console.
Overall, I'm quite impressed with this old operating system from Apple. Don't know what I'm going to do with it yet, but it should be interesting to play with. I'll see what happens...
p.s. Has anyone had any luck getting top to work in A/UX 3.0.1?
I had a couple of problems initially. Once I burned the iso to a CD-R and wrote the boot image to a flopy disk, I encountered an odd problem. The floppy disk booted fine and located the CDROM drive. It began loading from the CD-R no problem. But it gave me a strange message in the upper left hand corner of the screen: Panic: no root file system. I couldn't figure out what the problem was, but after a half dozen reboots it just worked.
I was worried that my Pioneer 12x CDROM drive would not work, as it will not work with Mac OS without installing some proprietary drivers. But I guess that doesn't really matter with A/UX because it bypasses the Macintosh Toolbox and works directly with the drive. Anyway, the CDROM drive just worked.
I was also worried that the CD-R that I burned the iso to might cause some problems. I read several posts that said that the iso should be burned at the slowest speed possible. I burned my iso at 40x. I didn't have any problems with the CD-R that I burned. It worked flawlessly.
Now that I have A/UX installed, I don't quite know what to do with it. I've been spending the last few hours trying to install stuff on it. So far I've managed to install VIM, wget, and gzip. Installing software in A/UX is not as simple and straightforward as it is in Linux or NetBSD. It requires a fair bit of tinkering. And the directories are something that I'm not at all used to -- I'm not used to /users versus /home, among other things.
Other than that, the X11 environment in A/UX is surprisingly quick on a 25MHz Quadra 700. It feels much more responsive than the X11 environment in Linux or NetBSD on a 68K machine. MacX is dog slow though. But I don't care, as I don't plan on running Mac OS aplications on this machine anyway. So I'll just stick with X11 or the basic console.
Overall, I'm quite impressed with this old operating system from Apple. Don't know what I'm going to do with it yet, but it should be interesting to play with. I'll see what happens...
p.s. Has anyone had any luck getting top to work in A/UX 3.0.1?
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