Digital UNIX and Tru64 UNIX Notes
A few notes and external links related to DEC OSF/1, Digital UNIX, and Tru64 UNIX that may eventually get organised to somewhere else.
Quick Notes
- The product was renamed from DEC OSF/1 to Digital UNIX starting with version 3.2
- Apparently Digital UNIX 4.0C was only released for the Personal Workstation au-Series.
Installing it on any other machine will just result in v4.0B.
- Digital UNIX 4.0D introduces y2k compatibility.
Earlier releases (going back to v2.0)
are not fully y2k compatible but there is an updated date command for them to allow setting dates past 1999 which
should be in the latest aggregate patch kit
- Digital UNIX 4.0E was the first release with Compaq branding (called "Compaq's DIGITAL UNIX" in many places),
with the product being renamed to Compaq Tru64 UNIX starting with 4.0F
- Digital UNIX 4.0E was the last release to include Display PostScript support. It was removed in Tru64 4.0F.
- According to HP, upgrading from 5.0F to 5.0A is problematic, instead they recommended going 4.0F -> 4.0G -> 5.1
- According to this page,
support for the DEC 2000/3000/4000/7000/10000 was dropped in Tru64 v5.1
- Notes about setting up Tru64 5.1B-4:
- It has a font server but its not running by default. This section of the manual describes how to set it up
but for quick testing you can just run /usr/bin/X11/xfs.
- To use it with xming, add -fp tcp/10.0.1.68:7100 (with the correct IP of course) to the command line arguments.
- This gets you fonts but only at one size which is far from ideal and makes the CDE file manager hard to use. Need to figure out why other font sizes dont work.
- The 5.1B-4 associated products CDs are missing a few things that were present in previous releases. To install them you had to fetch them from the website which required filling out a form
so unfortunately the wayback machine doesn't have them. If you've got older 5.1B media kits you can also just install older
versions of these from there. The products moved to web download only (most of which are available here) were:
- Insight Management Agents
- Java
- Mozilla
- Secure Web Server
- WEBES
- Advanced Server for UNIX (ASU)
- DECevent
- DataDirect SequeLink
- Tru64 UNIX to HP-UX ST
- binaryscan
- hpuxman
- The 5.1B-4 Media Kit doesn't include the Open Source Software Collection (formerly freeware) or Linux and Tru64 UNIX Portability Tools CDs. While the software on these CDs is pretty out of
date it may still be useful. The CDs from the 5.1B media kit are:
- AG-RHAYF-BS HP Tru64 UNIX v5.1B, Open Source Software Collection: RPM Install
- AG-RPQ6C-BS HP Tru64 UNIX v5.1B, Open Source Software Collection: sources
- AG-RQ08C-BS Linux and Tru64 UNIX Portability Tools: RPM Install, v5.4
- AG-RQBRC-BS Linux and Tru64 UNIX Portability Tools: Sources, v5.3
- User groups:
- The sysadmin group is enough for most admin tasks - when running SysMan you'll get asked if you want to run it as root or yourself, choosing the root option prompts for the root password
- If you want to be able to su as root you'll need the system group. Giving yourself this group won't take effect immediately - you probably need to log out/log in again.
- The documentation CD should be mounted at /usr/share/doclib/online (eg, mount /dev/disk/cdrom0a /usr/share/doclib/online).
If you want to have it always available without the CD in the drive you can just overwrite /usr/share/doclib/online/DOCS with the same directory from the CD.
- The confusingly labeled "HP Tru64 UNIX V5.1B-3 Version 5.1B-4 December 2006" CD-ROM is the 5.1B-4 update CD. To install the 5.1B-4 update in multi-user mode (something you
probably shouldn't do if the machine is at all important/in production), put the CD in the drive then:
- mount -r /dev/disk/cdrom0a /mnt
- cd /mnt/patch_kit
- Read the release notes and patch install instructions, or if you don't care if something breaks then just continue on
- as the root user, ./dupatch and give /mnt/patch_kit as the path when prompted. You'll get a message about a new version of the patch tools being installed.
- a the menu, choose option 1 - patch installation
- at the next menu, choose option 3 - check & install in Multi-User mode
- You'll get a warning about installing patches in multi-user mode and to insure no other users are logged in and nothing important is running. Answer y
- View the license: choose q to quit viewing, then agree with y
- It will then check the patch kits integrity, then gathers information - this all takes a few minutes
- View the special patch instructions
- Answer y to make the patch reversible if you like
- Answer y to proceed with installation
- Enter your name
- Enter any notes, enter a '.' on a line by itself to finish
- Installation of 62 patches then happens - this takes a while
- Configuration of the patches happens - lots of merging config files
- Then its kernel build time - if you have a pre-existing config file,
answer y otherwise n. It turns out I did have an existing config file
which had the same name as the hostname
- Once the kernel build has completed you're shown the special instructions again
- Choose to reboot now (option 1)
Links
- Tru64 packages from parsec
- GCC
- Installing OpenSSH on Tru64 UNIX 4.0F
- The old Digital UNIX/Tru64 website from the Internet Archive on a variety of dates:
- DEC/Compaq/HP once offered non-commercial licenses for hobbyists
- Slashdot article
- Archived compaq website
- HP version of the noncommercial page
- Included licenses were: OSF-BASE (Base OS), OSF-SVR (Server Extensions), OSF-USR (User), and OSF-DEV
(Developers Toolkit).
The C++ compiler requires CXXOSF so no DEC C++ with the hobbyist license
- This was discontinued sometime prior to October 2007 based on emails to HP, but they were willing to send out licenses and
media kits for free on request as recently as that date. I imagine any handing out of free hobbyist licenses ended long before
Tru64 became unsupported in 2012 making them unobtainable today