6 Mar
2024
6 Mar
'24
9:51 p.m.
On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024 at 1:16 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hello all,
I have a distribution of SVR2 on the PDP-11 that I have managed to get booting into the
initial root dump, but it is not clear to me how to proceed from there to format a /usr
filesystem and setup for multi-user.
...
I haven't managed to find any installation manuals or the like on Bitsavers, and I
can't even manage to find a listing in the source of the expected disk
partitions/sizes. I feel very much like I am stumbling in the dark here and would
appreciate any pointers to how to proceed. Thanks!
-Henry
First off I didn't know SVR2 made it to the PDP-11, I thought they cut it off after
the initial System V release, is what you have AT&T or some derivative version?
Second, this is the setup instructions for DEC processors for the initial release of
System V which included the PDP-11/70:
https://archive.org/details/unix-system-administrators-guide-5-0/04%20Setti…
Additionally, here is the Operator's Guide which details bootstrapping the system
among other things:
https://archive.org/details/unix-system-operators-guide-release-5-0/mode/2up
While not SVR2, hopefully the differences are minimal enough that you can use those. Good
luck!
Also regarding finding more documentation, sadly AT&T stripped out the /usr/doc
materials with System V, so these critical pieces of documentation actually can't be
found in a typical system distribution, rather, you had to get the paper copies. I'm
not aware of any discovery of TROFF sources for any of this stuff past System III, I do
have it on my long-term list to eventually synthesize copies of said documents from
available scans so they can be more easily diff'd, but my current focus is much, much
earlier.
- Matt G.