Screenshot on Symbolics LISP Engineering

Symbolics XL LAN Challenges

Wed, 05 May 2021 22:26:17 +0000

I recently set up a LAN of my three XL Symbolics machines at home. The XL1201 which was having stability issues has been largely stabilized (thanks to help from David Schmidt). I will post more about this LAN soon, but I thought I would mention an interesting problem.

The machines connect to the LAN via an AUI to 10BaseT transceiver, to my core LAN which is a mixed 10G/1G LAN. The core router is a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Pro which is attached to UNMS, their central management tool. When I connected these machines to the LAN, I was getting Merlin (the name of the CPU board) Ethernet errors on occasion, and eventually the computer would crash. I put the Symbolics computers on a separate segment connected only to a small Netgear switch and the EdgeRouter, but the computers kept crashing.

Genera Xquartz Keyboard

Sun, 17 Jul 2016 19:42:01 +0000

It has taken some effort, but I finally created a reasonable (and close-to-default) keyboard layout and mapping for Genera for using a modern, 87-key “tenkeyless” keyboard under Xquartz. I became reasonably familiar (at a reading level) with Flavors and Genera’s X implementation while reverse engineering all this stuff. I also used the apropos function a lot, of course.

This layout stays very close to the default one provided by Genera while adding a few tweaks such as:

MacIvory III Setup and X11

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 04:57:57 +0000

As I haven’t had the time to continue to debug the XL1201 hardware problems, I turned back to the MacIvory III and an Intel i7 NUC I had.

First I set up Ubuntu 14.04 on the NUC with NFS and the “time” service, so I could use it as an always-on server for the Symbolics computers. This way I can put the full size SCSI computer away when I’m not actually imaging SCSI drives.

Displaying Genera on iMac

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 19:11:12 +0000

Well, on a whim I decided to see if I could get Genera running on my iMac’s X display. (This way I can spare the 3620 Console from use while I figure out how to recap it.) It was a frustrating few hours fighting with XQuartz, actually.

First, I installed the latest XQuartz and made it listen on port 6000.¹

Then I set up my iMac as host NEON in the Genera Namespace Editor and typed Start X Screen NEON :Geometry 1600x1200+100+100. Boom, Genera just showed up on my iMac X server.

Genera 8.3 Setup, Part 2

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 04:07:18 +0000

Good evening with the XL1201 tonight. TL;DR:

Got NFS working on Genera, mostly
- Need to fix UIDs
- Showed editing a file on NFS server
Showed the SELECT-P peeking stuff
Saved file listings for downloading
Fine lines on the console

Continuing on from Part 1…

NFS Server, part 2

Let’s export /genera for use in all our Genera servers, and make a UID/GID especially for that. I’ll also export the root read-only directory just in case I want to access any of my other files on this server.

Clean Genera 8.3 FEPfs

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 11:46:00 +0000

I was asked to provide a full list of all the files on the XL1201 Genera 8.3 hard drive I received from David K. Schmidt. Here they are in screenshot form from the first boot this past Thursday.

Setting Up Genera 8.3, Part 1

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 04:48:00 +0000

I’m setting up Genera 8.3 on the XL1201 using a clean hard drive. Literally all this hard drive has on it is Genera 8.3 and these patches:

Genera 8.3 y2k patches
Copy world patch
Fepfs patch

This hard drive was sold by David K. Schmidt and has had most things set up already, so we’re not actually doing a full installation from CD-ROM.

Let me preface this by saying that I have read a lot of the documents on Bitsavers but have no actual experience with Genera and haven’t had almost any guidance on what I’m attempting to try. My goal here is two-fold:

Clean Boot of Genera 8.3

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 00:04:00 +0000

The XL1201 now boots nicely from a new ST318451LW Cheetah drive that David K. Schmidt sent (sold) me. It loads FEP version 333 and a clean Genera 8.3 distribution world with just a few patches:

Genera 8.3 y2k patches
Copy world patch
Fepfs patch

Does anyone know what the hold.fep file is?