Re: [ProgSoc] Decstation 5000/240 -- saga continues

[Telford Tendys <telford@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au>]

> That is actually a bug, and there is a patch for it. The infamous Skeeve Stevens
> used it for major amounts of fun at UNSW. They patched it after a while. ;)

Well fortunately for me the bug wasn't patched on this one.
 
> Hey, thats painful ;) i think you will find it is cursor addressable,
> but your term is not set to anything it knows about (control c drops
> you in a very early stage of system boot. edit /etc/passwd and your mount
> tables and reboot). The interesting thing with that baby is trying 
> to source a relativly recent compiler. Heh. GFL.

Well the latest status is that I have it talking to the ethernet and
I can at least telnet to it and when I get there through a telnet it
will recognise a linux console as close enough to a vt100. That at least
gets me vi and readable editing. All the filesystems mount up OK but
it seems to run out of tmp space quite easily because the root filesystem
is very small and all of the space is in /usr. I guess I can dig around
for another SCSI disk and mount it as /tmp to make life a bit easier.

There IS a compiler on there YAY! and it will at least compile hello.c
I believe that gcc supports MIPS quite well so I could use the existing
compiler to bootstrap gcc but I won't bother unless I have to.
The really crappy thing is that X11 won't come up which spoils the
whole point of the exercise. The strange thing is that xdm works OK
and will even let you login but when you do that it just fails to
get X going and drops back to xdm again <sheesh>.

There is an X11R5 directory that is a softlink to a remote mount that
doesn't exist anymore, there is also an X11R6 directory that is empty.
Can I...
  [A] compile up the latest X11R6 and use it
  [B] find the disk that belonged to the remote mount and copy
      (but I don't know which disk belongs to which cos they aint labeled)
  [C] get a pre-built X11 that is suitable (someone must have one).

Trouble is I don't even know where the xdm is logging it's errors.

> > It also implies that you know how to hook a tape drive to this thing,
> > that you HAVE a tape drive and that you have a clue about ultrix,
> > none of which apply to me...
> 
> You can actually get Ultrix on cd, and i suspect it should drive any sane
> scsi cdrom, like the sun single speed drives i have floating around my 
> desk up here in itd.

OK, I'll keep that offer in mind if I do happen to catch a flying
Ultrix CD from somewhere.
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