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by somat6 hours ago |
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upvoteby hanslub425 hours ago|
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> nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age

I do. But I do not need just any Unix shell account, I need old and weird ones! I develop and maintain a portable utility (rlwrap) that is aimed at users of older software, who are often also using older or even obsolete systems.

For years, I used Polarhome (http://www.polarhome.com/) as a "dinosaur zoo" of obsolete systems (thans, Zoltan!) For every new release, building it on a creaky Solaris or HP-UX machine would expose a few bugs.

Because older systems are being replaced by (much more uniform) newer ones, there is a diminishing need for such extreme portability. This is also the reason that Polarhome closed in 2022.

In spite of this, testing on many different systems improves general code quality, even for users of mainstream systems like linux, BSD or OSX.

Of course, I could setup a couple of virtual machines, but that is a lot of hassle, especially for machines with uncommon processor architectures.

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upvoteby sureglymop4 hours ago|
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Wow! I hope you know you are having a real impact in the world. Rlwrap has made my life easier so many times, it's in my top 3 most useful CLI tools. Thank you :)
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upvoteby rlonstein2 hours ago|
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> nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age

> I do. But I do not need just any Unix shell account, I need old and weird ones! I develop and maintain a portable utility (rlwrap) that is aimed at users of older software

Thank you, personally. I've used it in several contexts not just old systems, for example rlwrap is recommended with Clojure (okay, perhaps that's a comparatively small audience).

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upvoteby marttt2 hours ago|
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+1, same here, I've used line editors a fair bit (and enjoying line-oriented interface in general), so rlwrap has been an essential tool for me. Many thanks for your work!
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upvoteby mghackerlady1 hours ago|
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how does it compare to ex? ex is line oriented vi, can't go wrong there
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upvoteby mghackerlady1 hours ago|
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one of these days, I want to buy:

a powerpc xserve (running OSX server)

a sparc box (on solaris)

an alpha box (on either VMS or Digital Unix)

a pa-risc box (hp-ux)

a modern power box (Rocky or AIX)

an itanium box (running either VMS or NT depending on what the alpha is running)

a pi cluster (plan 9)

and a commodity x86 server (running OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Debian, Hurd, Redox, Serenity, reactos, and AROS).

and make a MOAP (mother of all pubnixes). if anyone has any hardware they'd like to donate, get in contact :)

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upvoteby zie57 minutes ago|
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I have had many of these machines at various points in time, some even running on the public internet. They are a giant PITA to keep running and alive. This is why they don't usually last very long if they ever even get to public access(most don't).

Unless it's a super fun hobby for you, I wouldn't plan on this being very fun after the first dozen random crashes.

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upvoteby mghackerlady54 minutes ago|
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I'm mainly doing it for selfish reasons, I want build farms for these platforms. The pubnix is just a way of giving back to this wonderful community
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upvoteby electroly1 hours ago|
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I'm curious, do you know which virtual machines (i.e. what emulator and what OS) you would want? Does the software exist and it's just a matter of the time to set it up? Or is it harder to get ahold of all the necessary old software (even if you have the emulator)?

Maybe in the modern age someone could make a "polarhome in a box" that offers a similar gamut of systems, but via preconfigured emulators that you can simply download and run.

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upvoteby hanslub4228 minutes ago|
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On Polarhome, I used QNX, SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and OSX. Having those running under qemu would be quite the challenge.

Until now, I have used qemu (or rather qemu-system-aarch6 in combination with binfmt-misc) on Linux to emulate e.g a Raspberry pi running on arm64. This works very well, but for e.g. Solaris or HP-UX there is the extra hurdle of getting hold of bootable media that will not freak out in the unfamiliar surroundings of a qemu virtual machine.

I have never tried, and it is possible that I overestimate the difficulty...

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upvoteby assimpleaspossi3 hours ago|
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At least you're running something with direct and real Unix roots.
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