Comment by hanslub42
10 hours ago
> nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age
I do. But I do not need just any Unix shell account, I need old and weird ones! I develop and maintain a portable utility (rlwrap) that is aimed at users of older software, who are often also using older or even obsolete systems.
For years, I used Polarhome (http://www.polarhome.com/) as a "dinosaur zoo" of obsolete systems (thans, Zoltan!) For every new release, building it on a creaky Solaris or HP-UX machine would expose a few bugs.
Because older systems are being replaced by (much more uniform) newer ones, there is a diminishing need for such extreme portability. This is also the reason that Polarhome closed in 2022.
In spite of this, testing on many different systems improves general code quality, even for users of mainstream systems like linux, BSD or OSX.
Of course, I could setup a couple of virtual machines, but that is a lot of hassle, especially for machines with uncommon processor architectures.
Wow! I hope you know you are having a real impact in the world. Rlwrap has made my life easier so many times, it's in my top 3 most useful CLI tools. Thank you :)
> nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age
> I do. But I do not need just any Unix shell account, I need old and weird ones! I develop and maintain a portable utility (rlwrap) that is aimed at users of older software
Thank you, personally. I've used it in several contexts not just old systems, for example rlwrap is recommended with Clojure (okay, perhaps that's a comparatively small audience).
+1, same here, I've used line editors a fair bit (and enjoying line-oriented interface in general), so rlwrap has been an essential tool for me. Many thanks for your work!
how does it compare to ex? ex is line oriented vi, can't go wrong there
one of these days, I want to buy:
a powerpc xserve (running OSX server)
a sparc box (on solaris)
an alpha box (on either VMS or Digital Unix)
a pa-risc box (hp-ux)
a modern power box (Rocky or AIX)
an itanium box (running either VMS or NT depending on what the alpha is running)
a pi cluster (plan 9)
and a commodity x86 server (running OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Debian, Hurd, Redox, Serenity, reactos, and AROS).
and make a MOAP (mother of all pubnixes). if anyone has any hardware they'd like to donate, get in contact :)
What, no SGI?
I have a Sparc, Alpha, NextStation, and SGI in my collection. I'd like to add an AIX system, ideally with PowerVM/LPAR support. I used to work at a place that built everything on AIX (this was 20+ years ago) and the virtualization functionality was pretty neat.
ay, knew I was forgetting something. In fairness those were always more specialty machines that happened to run unix on a cool arch than unix machines on a cool arch. You bought a sun because you wanted solaris on sparc, you bought an sgi because your art department outgrew their macs
I have had many of these machines at various points in time, some even running on the public internet. They are a giant PITA to keep running and alive. This is why they don't usually last very long if they ever even get to public access(most don't).
Unless it's a super fun hobby for you, I wouldn't plan on this being very fun after the first dozen random crashes.
I'm mainly doing it for selfish reasons, I want build farms for these platforms. The pubnix is just a way of giving back to this wonderful community
I'm curious, do you know which virtual machines (i.e. what emulator and what OS) you would want? Does the software exist and it's just a matter of the time to set it up? Or is it harder to get ahold of all the necessary old software (even if you have the emulator)?
Maybe in the modern age someone could make a "polarhome in a box" that offers a similar gamut of systems, but via preconfigured emulators that you can simply download and run.
On Polarhome, I used QNX, SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and OSX. Having those running under qemu would be quite the challenge.
Until now, I have used qemu (or rather qemu-system-aarch64 in combination with binfmt-misc) on Linux to emulate e.g a Raspberry pi running on arm64. This works very well, but for e.g. Solaris or HP-UX there is the extra hurdle of getting hold of bootable media that will not freak out in the unfamiliar surroundings of a qemu virtual machine.
I have never tried, and it is possible that I overestimate the difficulty...
Emulators can take you quite far, though you need to research some of them on the net to figure out working combinations of OS versions and emulator versions. Here are examples of things that I have managed to get to work at some point in time. Some for real software development and some for amusement.
KVM (x86 and x86_64): Linux, BSD, OSX, Hurd, Haiku, MSDOS, Minix, QNX, RTEMS, Xenix, Solaris, UnixWare, Windows 95 through 11.
QEMU (for non-x86): AIX 4, Linux (m68k, arm, sparc, powerpc, mips, riscv), OSX (ppc), Solaris 8 (sparc), SunOS 4.1.4 (sparc), Windows NT 4 (mips)
SIMH (for old DEC computers): NetBSD, VMS, Ultrix, RSX-11M, RT-11
Some of them can be quite finicky to get to work. Xenix was especially hard.
Solaris 11 is quite easy to get running in QEMU/KVM though. You can download the media from Oracle.
The only real hardware I routinely run has either Debian Linux, macOS, or Raspberry Pi.