Another Unix Victim

It finally happened. I acquired a nice little Alpha box (DEC 3000-700) last year that I had been wanting to play with and I finally got some time this month.

Didn't have a copy of VMS for Alpha... No problem, there's always Linux and NetBSD. Decided to try out NetBSD. The cute little demon logo clinched the deal. Much more interesting than a Penguin. I downloaded the nicely packaged CD image, burned a copy, and headed for 64-bit wordsize heaven. The demon should have been a clue...

I've used UNIX derivatives before. There's simply no way to avoid them. Even did some simple C and FORTRAN programming on one not too long ago. Nothing complicated or even interesting, but it paid well.

Installation was somewhat complicated; the built-in CD drive was shot. Finally figured out that my old Apple CD-ROM would work just fine. Booted off the Apple CD without a hitch. Ran the installer. System tests OK. Formatted the drives, created my parbreastions. Rebooted off the hard drive. Found myself in single user mode with the computer a little confused. Not surprised. Tried to edit rc.config. Can't do it - file system is read-only. Okay, exit single-user mode. Login as root. Edit the file. Oops! Terminal emulator doesn't understand the escape codes that vi is sending. Try ed. Almost works. Does this thing have TECO? Nope. How something screwy going on with the SCSI bus. Pulled out the old flakey CD-ROM. Won't boot. Disconnect the Apple. Won't boot. Terminated? Yep. Hard drive OK? Unknown. Swap out hard drive for another Apple product. Reconnect Apple CD. Reboot from CD. Running fine. Format. Parbreastion. Install. Reboot. Back where I was, single user mode. System confused. Exit. Login as root. Edit rc.config. Ok. Reboot. Back in single-user Repeat until frustrated. Quit for the night.

Back again. RTFM. Okay, where am I? Single user mode. Exit. Login.

# ls

Yeah. Okay... Dropped back into console mode again. Looks like another adventure in hardware. Just for kicks, put the DEC hard drive into the Apple. Did everything. Works fine. Hard drive is good. Put the hard drive back into the DEC. Cleaned and repaired the DEC CD-ROM. Booted off a NEW CD made from a NEW download of the NetBSD installer. RTFM. Repeat installation. Reboot. Single user mode. Exit. Login.

# ls

The new computer is now named HAL. I'm donning a pressure suit as I type...

-- Micheal H. McCabe