Well gunkies is getting a little more life to it, and Dugo contributed this install guide for 386 BSD. The final part of installation was injecting the second tape file containing System V PKG file to the transfer disk image and running pkgadd -d /dev/dsk/1s1. You can experience this by using the firstboot image file. After a reboot Dell UNIX booted perfectly. Once the cpio archive was extracted I have made few final touches taken from the original tape install script. What a mistake it was! I have lost several hours trying to figure out cpio header errors coming from the disk… By pure coincidence, while the tape archive was installing (with errors) I was researching for this very blog article and found that LBA starts at 504 MB… Recreating the hard disk images just few MB smaller took all tape and prior boot problems away! So to be on a safe side I have made the hard disk images 512 MB. In my infinite wisdom, for some unknown reason I’ve assumed that LBA addressing is required above 540MB. ![]() ![]() Then cpio -ict < /dev/dsk/1s1 was able to list contents of the emulated tape… with errors… In couple of iterations I was able to aim the host os dd if=file1 of=/dev/loop0 bs=512 seek=offset at the right place, which you work out using prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/1s0 command. Once VTOC was put in place I’ve attached the transfer disk image as a loopback device in my host OS. Fortunately dellsetup command does it all for you. A hard disk in Dell UNIX is pretty much unusable without a valid SysV partition and VTOC. The next step was to inject the tape “file” in to a right place on the disk, so it can be read by cpio command. Booting from the two install floppies and attaching two disk images was a snap. Unfortunately neither Dell UNIX supports LBA mode nor Qemu/Bochs support the Adaptec 154x controller required by the OS.Īs all normal install options have been exhausted, the only option left was to use a second hard disk image as source of cpio archive files. The original Dell 486 workstation had a 1GB SCSI hard disk. I have decided to try a hard disk image from a readily pre-installed system. Hopes for a network install are even slimmer since the required network support floppy disk has been lost and chances of suitable Ethernet driver working in Bochs or Qemu are equal to that of finding the lost floppy disk. Unfortunately no virtualization software can emulate a tape drive. The system can be installed from either a tape or network server (presumably NFS). I zipped up Bochs along with the disk here: 386BSD-0.0-with-bochs.7z Posted in 386BSD, 80386, bochs, BSD, i386, Net/2 | Leave a reply Dell UNIX Lives Again! And after the internet flame and lawsuit dragged on, neither of the splinter groups NetBSD or FreeBSD caught up, although both did reset upon the release of the 4.4BSD Lite 2 code. While USL was happy to fight both BSDI and the CSRG they never persued Bill Jolitz. The landscape radically changed with the infamous ad proudly proclaiming “It’s UNIX”. ![]() It’s almost a shame that GNU had stuck with the unrealized dream of a hierarchy of daemons, instead of adopting the BSD kernel with a GNU userland, on top of that tendy micro kernel Mach. A free Unix for the common person, the true democratization of computing by letting common people use, develop and distribute it independently of any larger organization. And for those of us who wanted something open and free 386BSD paved the way realizing the dream of the Net/2 release. The commercial world was going SYSV in a big way, and the only place that was to have a market was on the micros. One thing about this era is that you had SUN apparently forced out of the BSD business instead to work with the USL on making SYSV usable, leaving NeXT as the next big seller of BSD. The natural competition was Mach386, which was based around the older 4.3BSD Tahoe, and the up and coming BSDI, which had many former CSRG people which were also racing to deliver their own i386 binary / source release for sale. And it closed up the glaring hole of the lack of a free i386 port of Net/2. I had forgotten just how rough around the edges this was, as it’s missing quite a few utilities from the Net/2 tape, and isn’t complete enough to come up in multiuser mode, but it is capable of booting up.Īlthough 386BSD itself was really short lived with its effective short death in the subsequent release it paved the way for an internet only release of a BSD Unix by just 2 people. After a discussion on the passing anniversary on the TUHS mailing list I had to dig out my installed copy. I didn’t realize that I never uploaded this over there.
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