playing with the VAX 6460

Hi, this was my first 5 hours trying to do just some useful work with the VAX 6460 (phicus) under Ultrix 4.5, now that the worries are beyond getting it booted and getting free from VMS, I remember again how hard UNIX can be in terms of compatibility (of course that's all nothing as compared to how hard it would be on VMS :-). I was going to build the essentials of the amenities of the modern times, like gzip, GNU tar, bash and less, and Emacs and gcc and GNU make. All I did accomplish was to make Ultrix's date(1) Y2K complient warping my system time from 1976 up to 2002 :-). The patch is attached for those who have the sources. That was easy. Now gzip would build and install without remaking everything all the time because of my system time being decades behind :-). Gzip was easy too. Next was tar, and here came the first problems. The fact that Ultrix' cc is a k&r compiler and cpp is somehow not up to date is causing great pains. Lots of stuff fails because of this. I did try the VAX C compiler (vcc), which supposedly is ANSI-C, but it made the confusion worse. Some locale stuff was a common theme of stuff failing, which of course I hate. I never cared for locales, and I get upset if some locale crap goes in the way of getting things to work. But I figured, I needed to fast-forward my build- efforts to GCC. I have GCC-2.9x.3 (latest before 3.0) with an eye on making NetBSD from that platform. First I had to make GNU make, because the GCC installation procedure has become more sophisticated. Building make almost failed too had I not applied some broad strokes to make cpp and the locale stuff happy. Now with GNU make, that GCC build would still fail quite early for some strange syntax errors reported by cpp. I could actually build cpp and cpp0 without all the rest, but putting GNU cpp in front of Ultrix cc didn't do much good at all. Of course there may be lots of other things wrong, for I doubt anyone at GNU/Cygnus has tested the autoconf process on Ultrix/VAX lately :-). So, I decided I have to get some super old version of GCC, like 1.42 or earlier, that has a chance of having been tested on Ultrix back then. From that platform I might be able to move on to a more recent GCC version. Tried to build at least bash, but once again cpp woes in the lib/readline build (and readline is really my main reason for wanting bash!)`That's where I gave up on GNU stuff for today. Tried some kernel making again, on Ultrix, both 4.5 binary and 4.2 source. I think config(8) is indeed doing the symlinks to the BINARY objects, so doconfig should not be required indeed. However, I cannot seem to be able to bump up my MAXUSERS variable effectively. I have set maxusers to 128 but when I try my 3rd telnet connection I am being sent away. I somewhere read that Ultrix had some hard restriction to cut more money out of per-user licenses. Any idea what I might be doing wrong in terms of maxusers? Tried to build the Ultrix-4.2 kernel from sources. Need to supply the -s option to the config(8) command (to use sources instead of binary symlinks.) However, the 4.2 sources seem to be incomplete!!! I am missing at least sys/kern_lmf.c. Has anyone here ever built successfully and cannot be optioned out. Tried to play with 4.3BSD sources, Tahoe and Quasijarus. I must have FTPed the Quasijarus files in ASCII mode or Michael is using a strange compress format, as neither Ultrix compress nor gzip recognizes it as theirs. Noticed that the TUHS archive's Tahoe version has some broken files (as noted in BROKEN) that's sad. Tried to un-tar the src.tar.gz of Tahoe to get to 4.3BSD's config(8) tool (it's a good idea of Ultrix to put the config(8) tool into the sys/ tree rather than the usr.(s)bin/ tree.) That's where I noticed that the src.tar.gz is broken very early in the process. May be with GNU tar it could find a point to continue after the error, but then I need to build GNU tar first. Ah, the worries of UNIX. But it was always fun and never so frustrating as to make me want to throw hammers like I want to when I am stuck with VMS. Of course I appreciate tips as to how modern GNU stuff is built on Ultrix. regards, -Gunther -- Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D. gschadow(a)regenstrief.org Medical Information Scientist Regenstrief Institute for Health Care Adjunct Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine tel:1(317)630-7960 http://aurora.regenstrief.org