[Simh] More on VAX Emulation under Linux

[Zane H. Healy]

At 9:46 PM +1000 6/16/06, John wrote:
>Not being super-clever in terms of Linux, I was wondering how the 
>system might be set-up so that it 'effectively' boots as a VMS 
>system.  I'm currently following the article and have a call to the 
>VAX emulator in a script that is called from /etc/rc.d/rc.local (and 
>run with a delay as a background process), as well as running Linux 
>without X11.  This means the PC boots as a text-screen only Linux PC 
>and I need to type ALT-F8 to get to the VAX 'console'.  When I do, 
>the system is resting at the boot prompt ('>>>') and I can start the 
>VMS boot process manually.  I have the dep bdr 0 and set cpu conhalt 
>commands in the vax.ini file, as written later in the article but 
>the emulation still wakes-up at the boot prompt the first time.  If 
>I shutdown the VAX emulation (with/without reboot), it behaves as 
>expected... but how to get it running that first time?

I know how I do it on SIMH's PDP-10 and PDP-11 emulation, but I've 
never messed with the VAX emulation and it sounds like this probably 
won't work.  With those, I just put a "boot {disk}" at the end of the 
INI file (i.e. boot du0).

>Also, I wonder if it is possible to get Motif/DecWindows running in 
>this sort of system...  We have the licence PAKs etc but will the 
>software/emulator handle the GUI side of things...  or do I need to 
>have a real VAXstation?

You should be able to run X such that instead of connecting to your 
Linux box, it connects to the emulated VAX.  I did this 7+ years ago 
where my Linux box would bring up the login screen for my Alpha (and 
this was before 'xdm').  It was a good way to get a 24-bit display 
without spending a fortune :^)  I forget what command I used to do 
it, but I added a flag to one of the commands that you can use to 
start X from the command line that told it to connect to a different 
host for its X session.

The next trick will be to get an LK-461 keyboard working on your 
Linux box so you have a proper keyboard :^)

		Zane


-- 
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet)           | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
|                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |