jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) (09/09/87)
You may have heard me earlier, crying out in the dark for the "One Operating System" to unify my little group of machines. I've just recently heard that Mach will run on the Sun and the uVax, though it's still indeterminate whether or not it will support the qvss, vx2000 or Sun monochrome displays. I know it doesn't support Sun NFS, but it does something functionally equivalent and I can live with that. If I can't get X up on these puppies, I'm outta luck. Has *anyone* had prior experience with this? Jordan Hubbard jkh@violet.berkeley.edu
arnold@emory.UUCP (Arnold D. Robbins {EUCC}) (09/12/87)
The following "solution" requires lots and lots of source code licenses,
but as Jordan is at a university, he should be able to afford them. It
also will require some work on his part.
Sun 3/50:
Leave it alone. SunOS 4.0 will be nifty.
Microvax II:
Get Mt. Xinu's 4.3 + NFS product. They will supply bootable media
for the uVax. The X distribution has a QVSS driver. Authoritative
rumor has it that X 11 will have the QDSS driver as well. Meanwhile
the Ultrix QDSS driver can be made to work with Mt. Xinu's system.
Vaxstation 2000:
Start with Mt. Xinu's product and steal code from Ultrix 2.0 until
it all works. Ultrix can be used as a bootstrap vehicle, i.e. for
rcp-ing over the new kernal binary.
An interesting alternative: Sun ships a "vax" directory with their source
code, try config-ing SunOS to run on a vax. You may have to steal some
uVax stuff out of 4.3. It should still be doable, though. This will be a
particularly interesting project when SunOS 4.0 comes out. (Sun, of course,
will not even talk to you if you try this and it doesn't work and you want
help; they only support their own hardware.)
I really like the Mt. Xinu product, myself. Full 4.3. Full NFS. The NFS
stuff looks just like it does on a Sun; they ship the Sun documentation
for how to use NFS. They seem to be the only ones right now shipping
NFS 3.2 which supports file locking across the network; everyone else is
still back at 3.0.
Hope this helps!
--
Arnold Robbins
ARPA, CSNET: arnold@emory.ARPA BITNET: arnold@emory
UUCP: { decvax, gatech, sun!sunatl }!emory!arnold
ONE-OF-THESE-DAYS: arnold@emory.mathcs.emory.edu