I had old instructions to do this but getting TME running was a bit quirky.  And the package had lost most of it’s support.

(I did just go out and find that some folks have somewhat resurrected it…) 

I have the install manual for 3.5 ( http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.5/800-2089-10A_Release_3.5_Manual_for_the_Sun_Workstation_198711.pdf)

And did find this about TME Now ( https://pkgsrc.se/wip/tme )

And these instructions (which from the link before this page indicated as of 2019 they still worked  http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/sun3-150-nbsd.html )

That would get me “close” if I could somehow write to an emulated SCSI device.. or the SD card that supported it… etc.   Blue SCSI, Green SCSI, Pi SCSI, etc. I don’t care which (would prefer something that would let me use a “real” drive… SSD or similar is fine… rather than SD card).  I do have an image that gets me “somewhat” booting with a SCSI2SD but the additional drive mounts are wrong in the fstab/mtab so I can’t get it fully to boot….

If I can figure out the process, I’ll make images and share them (for all the early Sun OS’s) and write up a web page and post it to archive.org so nobody has to go thru this again :-)

Earl

On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:56 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

TME - most recently https://osdn.net/projects/nme/ - in theory does what you want.  Its setup and use is a bit idiosyncratic, and I have found that it is unhappy running on OSs other than NetBSD, but if you get it running it just works.  I've used it to set up installations of SunOS 3 and 4 on sun2, sun3, and sun4 architectures.

-Henry

On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:49, <earl@baugh.org> wrote:

I’m looking for a “Sun OS 3.5” emulation running where I can attach a SCSI emulator to it and get the full OS installed.

I’ve got tape images but I haven’t found the process to emulate how it used to work.   

From the initial boot prompt, you extracted them to the “swap partition” and then started the install and it would prompt you for the next tape when needed.

So, I guess we’d need an emulated tape or something, etc.    I have all the tar’s (all the way back to Sun OS 1 or so) but have been frustrated trying to make some progress.

Earl

On Mar 13, 2024, at 5:31 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 at 17:27, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

On 3/13/24 3:12 PM, Henry Bent wrote:

Hi all,

I've been working quite a bit recently with SunOS 4 on a SPARCstation 5, seeing what I can coax out of it in terms of building and supporting a modern computing environment.  I know that TUHS isn't really the right place for this, but can someone point me to somewhere that is?  I've made significant progress in some areas and spent a lot of cycles to get there - for instance, I have GCC 3.4.6 up and running - so I'd like to contribute to a community if one exists.  Is there a modern equivalent of sun-managers?

-Henry

Not an answer to the question, but on a tangent...

I recently saw that Solaris 11.4 SRU66 was released and had a yearning to see how things in Solaris land were doing (can't stand Gnome so OpenIndiana's a bust)... but with Oracle's Solaris, it's a mess at least for hobbyists (only get release patches, so I'm guessing the most up to date 'release' was 11.4 in 2018). So, when I saw your post on SunOS 4, I thought I'd tool around and see if it was easy to get rolling as a VM, turns out things have come a long way on that front:

https://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/

OpenWindows 3... wow... works great on my Mint instance. Now, if I could just remember how commands work on SunOS :).

Thanks Will!  You may also be interested in https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc as another resource about running SunOS 4 in QEMU.  I have considered moving my setup to QEMU, especially as it would be very easy to create a hard drive image since I am using a SCSI2SD board, but there is something about running these things on the original hardware that is difficult to leave behind.

-Henry