[Simh] SIMH/Vax woes

[Philipp Hachtmann]

Hello everybody,

> missing file, libpcap.a. This is under Mandrake 10.2 (aka
> Mandriva 2005 Limited Edition). 
I don't know Mandrake.

> don't have that file on my machine. Even though it's apparently
> not required for Linux, I downloaded libpcap from SourceForge,
> installed that. Nope, still no libpcap.a. 
I just have downloaded the original libcap source archive. Just unpack 
the sources, then run the configure script and "make all". It will build 
the shared libraries (libcap.so etc.) and also the static library 
(libcap.a - what you're looking for) will be there.

> So, the first question. Anyone managed to get the Linux version
> of SIMH/VAX to build on Mandrake? If so, where did you find
> libpcap.a? 
See above.

I have not tried to build that VAX thing yet.

Get the source of the library and compile it yourself, it's easy.

I just took a look into the simh makefile. That's a rather strange 
makefile with a bit ineffective structure. Also the way it uses the 
static library is very specific for one system (don't know which) and 
not recommended. You have to change the path.

Once I have rewritten the whole make thing for SIMH (took about two days 
and made the compile more than two times faster, small source changes 
did not anymore lead to full recompile) - but my proposed changes were 
rejected by Bob Supnik (don't know why).
Another very useful (as I think) patch I wrote integrated basic 
libreadline functionality (history functions like in bash) into simh. 
Although I made enough 'ifdefs' this proposal has also been rejected by 
Bob Supnik because - in his opinion - it is too linux-specific. In my 
opinion the history functions are absolutely neccessary to work 
effectively with simh.

If anybody is interested - let me know.


Best regards,
Philipp :-)