[retronet] Hi. I'm new here.

[Grant Taylor]

On 4/8/19 8:43 PM, Wossen Wyatt via retronet wrote:
> Hi Folks.

Hi,

> I'm new here.

Welcome.

> I stumbled across the Datashed while googling Sun stuff and I'm quite 
> impressed.

Yep, John has some nice equipment.

> I've recently acquired a Sun Ultra 45 and a Sun Fire v40z and I'm 
> looking for interesting things to do with them and a community to share 
> it with.
> 
> I also have an oldnforce-based Sempron system that i run Windows 3.1 on 
> (It's the only desktop system I have with IDE and floppy support on the 
> mobo) and I'm planning to try OS/2 and OpenStep on it. Hopefully I can 
> get them all to multi-boot.

Multibooting the Suns will be a neat trick.  In at least that I don't 
know how to go about it.  I guess you can boot off of different disks.  ;-)

If you're new to OS/2, I'd recommend 4 or 4.5 as they are most likely to 
work on non-ancient (more ancient than you have) hardware.  There are 
also some updated boot disks online that have different drivers and 
other modifications to work with newer equipment.  My biggest problem 
was with OS/2 not liking my hard drives.  I think they were too big for 
the boot disk from IBM to work with.  (Hence the updates.)

If you don't have the boot disks (just a CD / ISO), you can extract 
images off of the CD.

OS/2 has it's own boot manager that is designed to allow multiple 
operating systems (from the mid to late '90s) boot from it.  It will 
play nicer with others.  The same can't be said about Windows 9x. 
MS-DOS & Windows 3.x will likely be okay.  Windows NT 4 should be okay 
too.  I remember it being a game of what to install in what order to be 
able to get all the OSs on the system without stomping on each others 
boot loader.

There is also the possibility of a boot manager like System Commander. 
(That's what I used in the late '90s.)  I think some version of 
PowerQuest's Partition Magic also had Boot Magic.  They helped.  I know 
that System Commander had something to prepare the machine for the new 
OS.  It would sort of temporarily hide the existing OS(s) from the OS 
that you were installing so that it couldn't mess things up (as easily).

There was an art to it.  But it was fun.  And multi-booting multiple OSs 
from the '90s will get techies from the time to raise an eyebrow.  How 
high is dependent on the number of OSs and complexity.  }:-)

I've not personally messed with OpenStep.  So I can't comment about that.

> Is this list still active?

Yes.  Well, it's been idle as we've been busy with other things life has 
thrown out.

Again, welcome.  I look forward to reading about your progress, and 
trials and tribulations.  :-)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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