Article 3975 of vmsnet.pdp-11: Path: cs.utk.edu!gatech!udel!news.mathworks.com!news.kei.com!ub!newserve!rebecca!rpi!wilsonj From: wilsonj@alum01.its.rpi.edu (John Wilson) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp11,comp.sys.dec,comp.sys.dec.micro,vmsnet.pdp-11 Subject: Dave Mills' Fuzzball Date: 4 Feb 1995 09:00:11 GMT Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY Lines: 38 Message-ID: <3gvfmr$kqk@usenet.rpi.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: alum01.its.rpi.edu Xref: cs.utk.edu comp.sys.dec:29902 comp.sys.dec.micro:4618 vmsnet.pdp-11:3975 Dave Mills' Fuzzball operating system is now available via anonymous FTP from tats.wizvax.com in directory pub/pdp11/fuzzball. Fuzzball is a timesharing operating system for the PDP-11 with built-in TCP/IP support. It seems to be mainly targeted at the 11/23 and 11/73, but has conditionals for Unibus processors and 18-bit addressing which seem to work. However it supports Q-bus better, in particular there is no DEUNA or DELUA ethernet driver in the system. The distribution consists of four logical disk files, and RT-11 V5.X is required to build, boot, and run Fuzzball (it's not self-booting, so it has to be loaded and run from a running RT-11 system, and once running it needs RT-11's utility programs to do many common operations). Configuring the system is not for the faint of heart! Actually I can't seem to find any real docs on how to do it, and just so you know it's done by modifying some assembly language source files and making up .COM files to assemble the pieces and link them together; it's not magic but it could be intimidating to non-programmers. Also I would imagine that harrassing Mr. Mills for support would be a bad idea. And you certainly shouldn't expect *me* to know more than you do! (You can bug me anyway if you want, I'm certainly willing to *try* to help figure things out.) But the sources are pretty well commented and there's a HELP library which explains the user commands. One thing is clear from the sources, Mr. Mills really cares about what time it is! Anyway have fun, and if you screw up downloading please wait a day before trying again, I have an agreement with the person whose net my machine is on to keep usage low and the four disk images are 1MB each uncompressed. If anyone needs to have the files split out of the LD: images let me know, but if you can't read the LD:s then you probably can't assemble the files either. John Wilson