I Must Be Crazy (Pt. II)

Previously on This Space Intentionally Left Blank:

Andrew professed a desire to install that joke of the operating system world, the GNU/Hurd. We now return to our story.

Well, the Hurd attempt didn't go quite as planned. It seems I got rid of the hard drive I was planning to install it on. Since I'm having to use a spare hard drive until I get my replacement from Maxtor I don't have any others lying around to install onto.

Does this mean the end of my attempt to simultaneously install a new OS and force the Uptimes Project to add another icon? Of course not. Infact I've managed to find an even odder OS to install.

Plan 9? Been there, done that.
Inferno? Tried Plan 9, got scared. Not willing to try its successor.
QNX? Hey, I said odd OS here.
A/UX? Ah! Now we're talking!

Yes, not only have I managed to get my hands on some A/UX CDs, I've also discovered that, seeing as I have the 68882 add-on, my Mac IIsi is compatible with the operating system.

So, what is A/UX? The simple answer is Apple Unix. The longer answer is that it's a combination of AT&T's System V.2.2 (along with extensions from V.3 and V.4 and bits from BSD4.2 and 4.3) and Apple's System 7 (via a virtual machine) for certain Macintoshes that use the Motorola 68000 family of processors.

So, is it good for anything that you can't do in MacOS or Linux/BSD? Well, not really. You can run most MacOS apps via a supposedly fairly efficient emulation layer. You can run X11 (complete with twm). You can telnet in. But it's old, it's been unsupported for years, and what software has been ported over is relatively old. (apache 1.0 anyone?)

However, it's not like I was really planning on doing much with that Mac anyways. So, onto it goes A/UX and a copy of an acnient version perl5 so I can port my uptimes client.

Well, that's the plan anyways. Because after I finally got the boot floppy written I found out that that CDROM drive has decided to act very wonky indeed. In fact, it won't even recognise that a CD has been inserted in it. (Despite the fact that the CDs are recognisable using BasiliskII.) To make matters worse, these are the only CDs that the drive isn't recognising.

MacOS install CD? Sure.
Debian/m68k ones I burnt a while back? Why not?
Some ISO9660/HFS CDs I have of old Infocom games? Bring 'em on!
A/UX? Ermm… No.

I have a few ideas on what might work, but I'm tired and it's already after midnight. I'll sacrifice the mandatory goats to my SCSI chain tomorrow.