A/UX 3.0.1 on an SE/30

[beachycove]

I tried installation of A/UX 3.0.1 yesterday on an SE/30. The machine came to me at the weekend with 20MB ram showing up with Mode32 installed in 7.5.3; loathing 7.5.3, I wanted to see if A/UX would work and how fast or slow it would be on an SE/30.

The installation went without a hitch, but it was VERY slow in running. I was surprised to see that AppleShare Pro also installed just fine (I have this for an AWS95). The slow-as-cold-molasses quality, however, meant that I quickly relented and installed 6.0.8 just to see the SE/30 whizzing along as it was meant to do.

Having slept on it, however, I now regret that I didn't leave A/UX there a while longer. Yesterday, only 8MB of ram was recognized under A/UX. I had thought that A/UX overcame the 24-bit limitations of MacII era machines, was puzzled, but did not probe further. Having changed the configuration, I can no longer readily check, but I now wonder if the 8MB limit might have been due to an SE/30 defaulting to 24-bit mode in the A/UX Finder, rather than 32-bit mode (normal on a Quadra or presumably any 32-bit clean machine, and thus what I have previously seen)? In this case, as 8MB is very, very minimal for A/UX, starting it up the wrong way in 24-bit Finder mode might explain the slowness. (I did not get so far as to disable autologin, so I did not get so far as a proper A/UX login window. Ho hum. I should be more patient.)

Would anyone who knows the A/UX lore and so grasps what I am talking about care to comment on my speculations? I could spend another couple of hours doing a reinstallation and then going back and checking, but maybe you have already been there and done that...? Is the experiment worth repeating, or is an SE/30 really almost unusable under A/UX3.0.1?

 

[Udo.Keller]

...Would anyone who knows the A/UX lore and so grasps what I am talking about care to comment on my speculations? I could spend another couple of hours doing a reinstallation and then going back and checking, but maybe you have already been there and done that...? Is the experiment worth repeating, or is an SE/30 really almost unusable under A/UX3.0.1?

The SE/30 should detect all your memory. However, when running A/UX it will split the memory in two pools: one for A/UX and one for the MacOS on top of A/UX. The FAQ has all the details: http://christtrek.dyndns.org:8000/doc/aux/faq.html#AdminVM

The usability depends on what you're wanting to do with it. From my point of view, the performance is not the main limitation. The beloved 9" display is. It is just too small. And you need an ethernet card.

Having said this: I'm using a SE/30 with A/UX 3.02. But I do not use the builtin display. Instead, I use the builtin X-Window X11R4 distribution to drive a X-Window multi-windows xterm terminal session of reasonable screen size (XDMCP anybody?). For me, this is the perfect way to overcome the SE/30 limitations.

 

[porter]

An SE/30 should be identical in behaviour to a IIx or IIcx running A/UX.

 

[Unknown_K]

A/UX 3 divides up the RAM mostly to itself and a specific amount to the Mac OS desktop (this can be changed as needed). When I ran it on a 950 with 80MB or more of RAM I think I only had 8 or 16MB for the mac desktop, the rest was used by A/UX for buffers and programs.

 

[Bunsen]

20MB doesn't sound like a lot in which to try and run two OSen

 

[porter]

20MB doesn't sound like a lot in which to try and run two OSen

I run SunOS 4.1 on a 4Mb machine with no disks!

 

[Unknown_K]

20MB should be plenty for A/UX.

 

[z180]

I found somewhere the sunOS 4.1.4 for sparc source code.It is quite different

from a System V but has some kind of emulation like NetBSD and uses the system V derived code for STREAMS and IPC.I don't have 68k hardware

so i can't mix it with NetBSD or linux code to run on LC or Performa.

The only 68k mac that I had some years ago was la VX.

 

[billynomates]

I've got A/UX 3.02 on an SE/30, and although I've got 68MB in mine, I've been through a patch where I was using 16MB, and it wasn't too bad.

Never had any problems with the machine 'seeing' the full amount of memory... There's a 32 bit addressing option in the memory control panel, which I would imagine does a similar thing to the Mode32 extension for System 7?

Apparently it's important to update the stock 3.01 copy to a later version, as these updates have 'performance enhancements'. You can get these updates in the normal places.

Although you're never going to get anything blazingly quick, it's just about usable. Wouldn't want to do anything too hectic with it though, and it does take some time to start - probably about 4-5 minutes between power up, through login and to the desktop / command shell, which is a fair bit slower than 7.5.3 on the same machine.

 

[Unknown_K]

A/UX 2.x would be better for an SE/30 if you can find it. The Mac OS emulation layer is OS 6 (OS 7.01 on A/UX 3) and was designed for 030 processors.

 

[porter]

A/UX 2.x would be better for an SE/30 if you can find it.

Only for some values of "better".