Installing 4.2 BSD on SIMH

This is the procedure that I have used to install 4.2 BSD onto SIMH's vax 11/780 emulator.

Requirements

You will need the following materials to put together a 4.2 BSD installation:

• A working perl interpeter to make the tape images.
  
• A copy of gzip.
  
• A method of extracting the boot file from either the binaries (tar/gzip) or uudecode to extract it from here.
  
• A compiled binary of vax780 from SIMH, along with the vmb.exe again from SIMH.

You will need the following files from any 4 BSD archive from the 4.2 directory. I have used the files from archive.huihoo.org. You can use whatever method you like to download them, wget, a web browser etc..

ingres.tar.gz
miniroot.gz
new.tar.gz
rootdump.gz
src.tar.gz
srcsys.tar.gz
stand.gz
usr.tar.gz
vfont.tar.gz

With the files downloaded you will need to uncompress them all and then create the tape file.

The following command will decompress the tape files.

gzip -d *.gz

The tape needs to be created with the mkdisttap.pl program. Simply run the program and redirect it into a file called 42.tap .

% ./mkdisttap.pl > 42.tap
% ls -l 42.tap
-rw-r--r--  1 Neozeed  +SYSTEM  69943640 Feb  6 12:39 42.tap

Next you will need the boot program. I have uploaded a copy onto this wiki in uuencoded format. To decode it, simply access the article, and copy the contents of the quoted text (the begin/end part INCLUDING the begin & end segments) and save it to a text file. Then you will need to run the uudecode file as follows:

% ls -l boot42.uue
-rw-r--r--  1 Neozeed  None_ploc  9117 Feb  6 12:09 boot42.uue
% uudecode boot42.uue
% ls -l boot42
-rw-------  1 Neozeed  None_ploc  6600 Feb  6 12:28 boot42
% file boot42
boot42: data

Boot 1.

We are going to use the following config file to start the first phase of the installation. Save the following configuration into a file such as '1.txt'.

set rq0 ra81
at rq0 miniroot
set rq1 ra81
at rq1 rq.dsk
set rq1 dis
set rq2 dis
set rq3 dis
set rp dis
set lpt dis
set rl dis
set tq dis
set tu dis
att ts 42.tap
set tti 7b
set tto 7b
load -o boot42 0
d r10 9
d r11 0
run 2