Exciting but cryptic announcement for AMIX enthusiasts

[Matt_H]

Hey, is the 2.1 version of SetClock still Y2K non-compliant?

[Failure]

Matt_H wrote:
Hey, is the 2.1 version of SetClock still Y2K non-compliant?

Does the sun still rise in the east?

But it does do a lot of things better.  Compilation for instance.  I am merrily compiling my way through gcc 2.95.3, getting much farther than in 2.03.  I had to fix a bug in collect2.c myself, but now it is chugging along having compiled that properly.  I doubt it will be the last error and I'm not really hopeful it will go all the way through, but the stage1 compiler has now completed and it is compiling stage2 using the newly built gcc 2.95.3 :-)

If this works, in addition to C, C++ and Objective C, we will have Java(!) on AMIX via gcj.

[Dalamar]

I did manage to get the PDF AMIX Manuals off of mmhart if anyone ever needs them just in case the site doesn't come back up.

I'm working on compiling Apache on 2.1 so I'm hopeful that I will have a full time AMIX web server running Soon(tm).  

Oh boy!  My A3000 running UNIX, and my A4000 running OS3.9.  I'm in Classic heaven.

[Minuous]

Now we just need the AMIX SDK...

...because I still need to find out the meanings of the AMIX bits in the battery-backed memory...

[Dalamar]

@Minuous

Have you tried the Amiga Technical Reference book series?  I remember digging through there and finding out way more than I wanted to know about the Amiga.  Just a thought.

[Dalamar]

@Failsure

Can you add a section for the UNIX manuals that MMHART scanned?  I will upload the one incomplete archive I have.  It's better than nothing.  I also have the marketing brochure for the 3000UX scanned.

[Failure]

Sure Dal.  I'll even do one better and give you upload rights to it as well ;-)  I'm kinda sad that site is gone, it has been around a long time.

Were you able to get Apache compiled on your system?  Just wondering how that webserver is coming along.

I just got a cleaning tape for my A3070 drive, and I'm waiting on getting ten of the 6150 tape carts.  I bought them used very cheap, but I won't get them until February.  Once I do I'm going to try and make a working 2.1 tape.

[Dalamar]

I have tried to make the tape with my 3070 already.  It writes out OK (after I have renamed all the 01,02,03 files to the files in seglist) but when I use the boot floppies I get read error on the tape before it even loads in the first package.  I'm trying again with the bs=32k statement removed from dtdist.sh.  I will make two tapes just to be sure.  I blew up the AMIX install when I tried this so I've had to reinstall a bare bones version to try again.

Wish me luck on attempt two.

[Failure]

Yeah, I read on Usenet that the blocksize specification screwed up the read.  Let me know how it turns out without it.  If you install with the tape successfully, I believe you should be able to patch your system to 2.1c without the problems HD hack people are having.

My tape drive was absolutely filthy by the way.  Good thing I cleaned it before using it...

*edit* if you continue having problems, try zeroing out the tape before writing the cpio files to it with the script.  Especially with old tapes this seems to help sometimes.

[odin]

@you guys
Good stuff keeping C= history like this alive!

[Dalamar]

Since I can say I'm not very savy when it comes to tapes how does one zero out a tape?  I tried mt erase, but that's not supported.

Also, where did you locate a cleaning tape?

[Dalamar]

Thanks odin.  It's been a lot of fun I must admit.  All of this Amiga stuff running around here.  :-)  Getting Amix 2.1 up and running has been an obsession of mine for over two years now.

[Failure]

Ok.  Assuming you are using the scripts from the wiki site, they are wrong O_o

Change the dd in dtdist.sh so it says:

[color=0000ff]dd if=$name of=/dev/rmt/4hn bs=32k[/color]

4n is 120MB mode.  That works for every release of AMIX except 2.1, because 2.1 is huge and needs a 150MB tape.

I am seeing conflicting reports on Usenet as to whether the "32k" is good or bad.  Apparently it is the blocksize used on the original 2.1 tape.

Second thing, to zero out anything (tape, disk, or to make a big empty file) use /dev/zero:

[color=0000ff]dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rmt/4hn[/color]

I got my cleaning tape from these guys.  Part number 343032, cheapest I could find it.

Better luck now that you can fix the script :-)

[Dalamar]

OK>  I'll try the above if this run doesn't work.  At this point I'm running the tape that I created without the 32k and it's had no read errors.  It's not done installing but at least it actually started this time.  

/me crosses fingers....

[Failure]

Hmm.  I wonder if you can avoid destroying your installation every time you try this :-/

I will post the 2.1 installation script on the site, the tape extraction part is near the end (search for QUIETCPIO).  If you set the environment variables accordingly you should be able to "fake" the install into a temporary directory without blowing away your working install.

[Dalamar]

Well, the install failed.  I didn't modify the tape create script with the 150MB mode (I didn't see that post until the install was running) but here is what happened:

I created the tape
Installed off of floppies
The tape kicked in and ran but every package following core fails with unexpected-end-of-archive....  

I've tried running amixpkg from the working core install to get the net package, and I get the same result.  None of the packages are installing after core.    How annoying.  Is it possible that the packages are out of order somehow on the tape?  This is a bit over my head now.  I've never had luck with tapes.

Is there any way to install the net package so I can at least use this install to make more tapes?