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[8088mph]

I wanted to use Lisa XENIX as a terminal emulator to a Linux PC so I made a couple changes to the Kermit source code and compiled it on XENIX. The program works great, exactly what I wanted. I tried to backup my source changes and the kermit binary to a floppy image using a Floppy Em but regardless of if I try using a blank LOS floppy image or an existing XENIX disk image, I always get corrupt data when trying to read it back. I tried these commands:

tar cvf /dev/fd files

tar cvfk /dev/fd 400 files

Any ideas? If nothing else, I can transfer the files to the PC using Kermit and create a disk image there.

[rayarachelian]

Hi 8088mph, welcome.

Not sure, does it work when writing to a real floppy drive? You might want to ask at the big mess o'wires site, my guess would be Xenix is doing something odd, or maybe it's confusing the disk size 400k vs 800k.

are you able to do tar tvf from the disk device and get back what it wrote?

Off the top of my head, and I barely remember this, there's several different floppy devices in the /dev/ directory which turn on different options, I don't recall what they mean, but I think some of them will eject the floppy after a close, and possibly some are different sizes.

[8088mph]

I have not tried with a real floppy. I would assume it works since it's the command they have in the XENIX manual. I can try it. I am able to write to the image with no errors. The problem is when I try extracting it with tar xvf, sometimes some of the files are missing, other times they're there but I get a checksum error on tar, sometimes no error but when I go to run the extracted binary, it prints out garbage or doesn't work. I installed Multiplan and Lyrix using the Floppy Emu and tar xvf, and they work, so I think the problem is in writing the files.

[stepleton]

Just a thought: do you think this might be an incompatibility having to do with Xenix using a really ancient version of tar?

What happens if you use dd to read and write raw data to the disk? Do you get the same thing on the other side?

[jamesdenton]

I wanted to use Lisa XENIX as a terminal emulator to a Linux PC so I made a couple changes to the Kermit source code and compiled it on XENIX.

Off-topic, but...

Which version of Kermit did you end up using?

I posted two different versions of the source code that I know will compile on UniPlus. I am not sure about XENIX.

https://github.com/arcanebyte/uniplus/tree/master/kermit

[8088mph]

I tried a few things. Writing to a real floppy works fine. I tried writing the tarball to the Floppy Emu using dd and still had problems. Then I booted BLU, read from the real floppy, and wrote to Floppy Emu and to serial. The copy I wrote to the Floppy Emu still had problems. Once I copied the image I transferred over serial to the Floppy Emu, it worked fine reading from the Floppy Emu. There is some problem in writing XENIX disks. In all of the problematic cases, what I saw was the files were still the same size but occasionally had 512 byte segments of the files replaced by all 0 bytes (NULL characters) when written using the Floppy Emu.

I attached the files I created.
kermit.dc42.gz is a gzipped floppy image of kermit binary, extracts to ./usr/bin/kermit
kermit_src.dc42.gz is a gzipped floppy image of kermit source code including my modifications and a Makefile as well as the binary, extracts to ./kermit/
kermit_src.tar.gz is a gzipped tarball of the source code and binary as individual files

[8088mph]

I wanted to use Lisa XENIX as a terminal emulator to a Linux PC so I made a couple changes to the Kermit source code and compiled it on XENIX.

Off-topic, but...

Which version of Kermit did you end up using?

I posted two different versions of the source code that I know will compile on UniPlus. I am not sure about XENIX.

https://github.com/arcanebyte/uniplus/tree/master/kermit

I am using Kermit 3.0 http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ftp/archives/uxk300.tar.gz

I found it here http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/archive.html

Should I give UniPlus a try? Are there any advantages over XENIX?

[rayarachelian]

Should I give UniPlus a try? Are there any advantages over XENIX?

Well, you won't have lyrics/multiplan but it is a fun alternative Unix, it's based on real Unix System 3 (I think) source, and A/UX was built from it. I wouldn't say there's specifically an advantage, it's just yet another flavor.

For both of these you'll want at least two ProFile drives or at least a Widget as they like lots of disk space. If you're on an X/Profile, that's the best way to go.