[Simh] Off topic: ULTRIX question

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On Sun, 12 Jul 2015 17:20:19 -0500
Gary Lee Phillips <tivo.overo at gmail.com> wrote:

> There is still Linux for Alpha, Johnny, though it's beginning to age
> from lack of supporters. Debian for Alpha exists up through "Sid" I
> think. CentOS also had an Alpha version last time I looked. I have run
> the Debian versions and they pretty much work as they should. I've
> never seen Linux for VAX at all, that's true.

More to like about the VAX...

> I'm not personally concerned with security patches, as my machines are
> not usually on the net at all. I live in a rural area where
> connectivity is costly and not to be wasted. I use the machines mostly
> for mathematical and engineering experiments and personal amusement.
> I'm a radio amateur, and the Alphas are real nice for circuit
> simulations and RF modeling, for instance. Fortran does pretty well
> there. I raised my question because though the "unsupported
> distribution tape" for ULTRIX 4.0 includes Gnu EMACS as a source
> archive, it was clearly not actually ported or tested (as in, make
> fails immediately despite README claiming otherwise.)

Solaris has a pretty nice Fortran compiler available that covers most of
F2003 in the latest release. And you can build Emacs without much
difficulty using that or the old gcc (4.2.2 I believe) that comes with
Solaris or get a prebuilt copy from someplace like OpenCSW. 

> Since downloading large files is next to impossible here, I try to
> know what I'm getting into before forking over $60 for a set of
> distribution CDs. One of the BSD flavors might suit, but it's very
> difficult to be sure from the descriptions that are offered.

Ask on the mailing lists and if it is something you want to try you can
probably find somebody willing to burn CDs (yep, don't even need a DVD) for
whatever you want.

> Clearly VAX or Alpha aren't exactly high on their priority lists. Current
> pages on both BSD sites link to non-existent pages on HP sites, for
> instance.

Judging from what's going on at HP right now that might be an HP problem
rather than a problem at the sites linking to HP... And you may not be able
to judge what's going on with the platform support based on the web pages.
OpenBSD is a small project and if they have one or two good devs on a
platform they might not have any time to write the doc or fix web pages.
And once the port works it might not get any attention because it simply
doesn't need any. Checking the mirrors for packages for that architecture
is a good way to get an idea if the platform is still alive as far as they
are concerned. Of course if the OS itself is not found for that platform on
the mirrors then chances are it's going to be some work.

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