PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
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PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
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Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#2Posts like this, projects like these, and people like Neozeed are part of why I think the GNU project fundamentally is brilliant.
Getting GCC running on barely-produced prototype hardware system, on an ancient version of Solaris which itself was a particular pain to install, whilst entertaining and informing the reader about the history of the PowerPC migration circa 1994, is no mean feat.
What were the desirable/sexy features of OpenFirmware anyway? I remember typing occasional commands into it on old Macs (especially a Beige G3 running Mac OS 9 and, later, with varying degrees of grumpiness, OS X), mostly with the fear of god of bricking my system.
There was also that separate "crash" shell you could bring up once the machine had booted with a magic key combination involving the power button, and pressing something like 'R' would reboot it. I wish Apple was a bit more open about these programming interfaces – a bit like Solaris.
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#3Posts like this, projects like these, and people like Neozeed are part of why I think the GNU project fundamentally is brilliant. Getting GCC running on barely-produced prototype hardware system, on an ancient version of Solaris which itself was a particular pain to install, whilst entertaining and informing the reader about the history of the PowerPC migration circa 1994, is no mean feat. What were the desirable/sex…
Conceptually I think the nice thing about OpenFirmware was that it was basically a Forth shell and had a bit more utility in bringing up systems and testing bare metal systems.
But my interaction with it was mostly like yours.
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#4This article brought back a memory of a fellow high school student who had somehow obtained a windows NT PowerPC CD that we tried and failed to boot from in a PowerMac 6100.
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#5Years later there was another port of OpenSolaris to IBM Power computers called "Polaris": https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/10/solaris_on_power/
And even port to IBM z/VM ("Sirius"): https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/17/solaris_on_mainfram...
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#6It'd be worthwhile to give pkgsrc a try.
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#7If you get access to an IBM RS/6000, another thing to play around with on it is the original AIX operating system.
Imagine a Unix that got an IBM working-over. When the RS/6000 workstations first came out, AIX was a big contrast to the more seat-of-pants workstation Unix of SunOS 4 (this was before Solaris 2).
Some of the AIX changes weren't only enterprise-y server management OS abstractions, but fun: AIX included a nice GUI hypertext browser for its documentation, in 1990 (possibly earlier).
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#8Posts like this, projects like these, and people like Neozeed are part of why I think the GNU project fundamentally is brilliant. Getting GCC running on barely-produced prototype hardware system, on an ancient version of Solaris which itself was a particular pain to install, whilst entertaining and informing the reader about the history of the PowerPC migration circa 1994, is no mean feat. What were the desirable/sex…
The most desirable feature would have been the possibility to have one very compact and flexible firmware for any expansion card for any host system on any bus system. As it were, the market decided to have it the other way around. I.e. an absolutely common graphics card with an ATI chip for some workstation, or Power Macintosh was a 'speciality'. IIRC Acer or some other vendor beginning with A produced ONE VGA-card for PCs about 20+ years ago. Of course it was a flop, because no real benefit, when plugged into a x86 with BIOS, with no knowledge of that. At least it worked via some shim. Now we have EFI/UEFI/SSBA with all the PC-inspired crap, or U-Boot and similarly insular stuff instead.
(shrug)
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#9Posts like this, projects like these, and people like Neozeed are part of why I think the GNU project fundamentally is brilliant. Getting GCC running on barely-produced prototype hardware system, on an ancient version of Solaris which itself was a particular pain to install, whilst entertaining and informing the reader about the history of the PowerPC migration circa 1994, is no mean feat. What were the desirable/sex…
It’s a huge strength of the ecosystem, and something that many new projects seem to ignore (which I can’t really blame, but still, it’s sad). There are so many platforms almost forgotten to history that happen to have a GCC toolchain for them; perhaps a few dozen UNIX tools, but that itself opens up a whole world.
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#10This article brought back a memory of a fellow high school student who had somehow obtained a windows NT PowerPC CD that we tried and failed to boot from in a PowerMac 6100.
hahahaha. I did this on an IBM prep machine, a really straightforward install of NT 3.51.
It even managed to run some x86 windows stuff - incredibly slowly (this was ~2005)
And it ran the windows 2000 shell preview as well! - though I may have installed NT 4 by then.
It ended up running Debian and being a mono test bench until it was retired to being an MP3 player for the home office.
Alas it was accidentally recycled along with a host of other stuff I was avoiding to deal with. Still it was fun to play with at the time!