[FreeVMS] Resending with corrections --- some progress...

[Roar Thronæs]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 05:37:10PM +0000, Tucker, Roger N wrote:
> 
> I think more information needs to be added to the HOWTO to help people like me get started (When I started, I couldn't understand most of the notes in the HOWTO - when possible please spell things out for us non-unix experts...).  I'm using the stable version of Debian.  I worked for many days, but I could never get the packaged bochs normally installed with Debian to work correctly (but this could have been something I was doing wrong at the time.)  I finally deleted this package and downloaded the latest version of bochs v2.3, rebuilt it enabling the correct options and finally got the latest freevms (built from scratch) booted for the first time in bochs.  Yea!!!

Possibly. When I tested with the packaged version it worked ok.

>       --with-term
>       --with-x11=no
>       --with-x=no

It did not work with X?

> I finally understand at least some of what is going on with the freevms build; it seems more obvious now but at the time there was just too much to learn and not enough time to learn it all.  Because of lack of disk space, I'm only building the IA32e version of freevms386.iomm by editing the freevms/envscript and commenting out all but this one.

The 64-bit version?

It did not matter if you dropped the rest.
The UML version is dead, and the -noiomm version has not been compiled/tested
for a long time.

> To execute bochs and boot to this virtual floppy you need a .bochsrc configuration file.
> 
> It seems that you also have to be under the root account or you will get "Error 25: Disk read error" when you boot freevms.

Or chmod the image with write permission.
You will need to be root if using networking.

>       Message: ata0/0 image size doesn't match specified geometry.

It now needs exact geometry.
Just factor the image size into 3 numbers that will make up the geometry.

>       ls /name
>       (About the only really interesting thing on this disk is:
>             /name/vms\$common/sysexe/pagefile.sys)

There should have been a lot more files.
If dcl was missing it would crash.

> My guess, is that the second partition (2a) must be an ods2 partition.
> 
> I'm not sure how to view this partition under linux.

Just follow the ODS2 related instructions in the HOWTO.

> My next step now is to try to figure out how to get a debugger working...with source code hopefully...

The debugger starts automatically when compiled in (at least with X).
I prefer the internal debugger. It can handle watchpoints faster.
I use gdb linux/vmlinux to find out symbols etc.

-- 
Regards,
-Roar Thronæs