using coherent on Duron system
Andrzej Popielewicz
I have already reported that I have been able to create floppy bootable
kernel for 4.2.10.
I have just discovered how to boot from IDE.
I have taken harddrive (1705 MB Seagate IDE) and plugged it as primary
master in Duron 1300 MHZ system. IDE contained already prebuilt Coherent
partition (< 500 MB), which I have installed on another 300 MHZ system.
In BIOS : I have set the type of the disk to USER and then set
32 bit OFF
block OFF
LBA OFF
PIO AUTO
and it has booted.
I have chosen the partition number : 0 (disk contains 2 partitions) and
pressed enter.
It has stopped for while so I sould press a TAB and enter the name of
the kernel : coherent.min (that used during installation of Coherent)
and coherent.min booted to multiuser mode.
Small but important detail : coherent.min does not support virtual
consoles, so Your /etc/ttys file should contain the entry :
1lPconsole
and all other entries should be disabled (begin with 0 flag).
Do it before , on older system (or echo 1lPconsole > new.ttys etc).
System is stable, in the sense I can reboot many times.
All commands work fine (vsh , elvis, df etc).
Minimal kernel has driver for floppy . And it supports PS2 keyboard of
course. It does not have neither COM driver nor LPT(?).
As a test a have installed my original DDK.
Problems : at the moment no new kernel can be built (!!??).
I did not try to install Coherent from scratch on such a system . It
should work. Do not forget to disable virtual consoles.And create
partitions before installation (using Linux CD or my rescue floppy cfdisk).
Andrzej
Joa~o Jerónimo
> Problems : at the moment no new kernel can be built (!!??).
Are you a long-term coherent user?
I usually like to try very old operating systems just for fun... I found something that is
supposedly the Coherent source code on the web and began reading some parts of the source code... I
could not identify the assembler syntax nor of course compile it, but I became a bit interested in
Coherent and would like to try it...
The boot images didn't work for me in Bochs, nor in an old 486... I guess that, in the 486, tboot
doesn't even jump to the kernel (No! It jumped, because ctrl+alt+delete didn't work, and the switch
to protected mode is done in the kernel, not in tboot... unless tboot disables the interrupts before
jumping to the kernel, which I don't know)...
In bochs, it panics with the same error message that another user reported an year ago in this very
newsgroup: PANIC : fsminit : no rootdev(4,15)...
And what about copyright status? Do you know if I risk being arrested!?
Any guess?
JJ
Andrzej Popielewicz
> Andrzej Popielewicz wrote:
>
>>Problems : at the moment no new kernel can be built (!!??).
>
>
> Are you a long-term coherent user?
>
>
nor in an old 486...
Did You try to use rescue floppy from
http://main2.amu.edu.pl/~apopiele/coherent.html
Rescue floppy uses older version of tboot.
If boot from rescue floppy succeeds then copy tboot from floppy to HD.
Sometimes helps(for example on duron system) to enter :
info
info
just before coherent kernel boot. During startup (after tboot starts
with message "COHERENT Tertiary boot Version 1.2.7 (or 1.2.6 if You use
rescue floppy)) press space tab and You will be prompted to enter
kernel name. Enter two times "info" and then "coherent".
Andrzej
>
> And what about copyright status? Do you know if I risk being arrested!?
>
Well , the rescue floppy was authorized by the owner. I did not obtain
any comments concerning existing archives.
>
Andrzej
Andrzej Popielewicz
> Joa~o Jerónimo napisał(a):
>
>
> http://main2.amu.edu.pl/~apopiele/coherent.html
Sorry it should be :
Andrzej Popielewicz
> Andrzej Popielewicz wrote:
>
>>
Rescue floppy is rather for users who have already Coherent installed.
In Your case , You will not be able to copy tboot from floppy to HD.
It will be also difficult to copy tboot from rescue floppy to installer
floppy.
I dont remember if rescue floppy has mkfs command . If Yes You could try
to create Coherent file system on Your HD. If not , well You need
another 486/Pentium/K5 to try out(if info info did not work).
I any case rescue floppy has cfdisk to help You create partitions.
Andrzej
Joa~o Jerónimo
> Rescue floppy is rather for users who have already Coherent installed.
> In Your case , You will not be able to copy tboot from floppy to HD.
> It will be also difficult to copy tboot from rescue floppy to installer
> floppy.
I mounted the Doherent filesystem on Linux with the driver "sysv"... Coherent FS is a derivative of
the one found on System V.
JJ
João Jerónimo
> I mounted the Doherent filesystem on Linux with the driver "sysv"... Coherent FS is a derivative of
> the one found on System V.
Read only mount...
JJ
João Jerónimo
> I mounted the Doherent filesystem on ...
Doherent -> Coherent
JJ
Andrzej Popielewicz
Did You mount Coherent floppy or Coherent partition on Your HD ?
If it was floppy, You can of course copy files from Coherent floppy to
Your Linux partition on Your HD.But it does not bring nothing for Your
purpose of having tboot on Your installer floppy(read only mount).In
somer older Linuxes (like RedHat 6) it was possible to mount Coherent
filesystem with write access. Of course You could try in such a case to
copy tboot from Linux partition(copied as mentioned above) to installer
floppy.I remember to do such things in the past, but no warranty.One
could copy single files from Linux to Coherent. Do not try to use tar
under Linux to create tar archive on Coherent file system mounted. You
could easily damage it.
If it was HD , than You have Coherent partition on Your drive. In this
case try to copy tboot from rescue floppy to Your Coherent partition
after booting rescue floppy(during boot choose kernel which mounts
floppy, I do not rememeber which, another kernel mounts HD filesystem).
After succesful booting from rescue floppy You have to mount this
partition (mount /dev/at0a /mnt for example), before You can copy.
Andrzej
Andrzej Popielewicz
>
> http://main2.amu.edu.pl/~apopiele/embed.html
Since March 2007 the above address is changed to :
Andrzej Popielewicz
> Andrzej Popielewicz wrote:>
>>Problems : at the moment no new kernel can be built (!!??).
>
In the meantime the problem is solved, I can easily create stable kernel
for Duron 1300 MHZ system.
Andrzej
Markus E Leypold
Andrzej Popielewicz <va...@icpnet.pl> writes:
We've been mailing a long time ago -- I think in 2004. You've been in
contact with Robert Schwartz about releasing the sources to Coherent
officially (that is: We all know there are sources around somewhere
but adhering strictly to the letter it's not allowed to copy them at
all). Has there be any progress in this?
Regards -- Markus
Andrzej Popielewicz
> >
> all). Has there be any progress in this?
> > Regards -- Markus
>
I hope.As far as I know Bob works now on licensing terms.As soon as
possible I will let You know.
Andrzej
Oliver White
From what I understand Coherent was released open source a few years back,
or at least into the public domain. I am far from an expert on the subject
of the copyright status of old Unix clones however.
Since Mark Williams Company failed however, the copyright likely belongs
to something that doesn't exist, as I am reasonably sure that no one
actually bought the copyright. As for the speculation that it at one point
belonged to MKS (which I've seen on other groups) I can say for certain
that it does not, nor to Randall Howard. I am reasonably certain it does
not belong to any of the other people on the team that wrote it.
Hope that helps
Andrzej Popielewicz
> On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 07:18:24 +0100, Andrzej Popielewicz wrote:
>
>
> From what I understand Coherent was released open source a few years back,
> or at least into the public domain.
It cannot be true.
>
> Since Mark Williams Company failed however, the copyright likely belongs
> to something that doesn't exist,
Copyright rights are valid even if commercial entity does not exist any
more.For example if at the moment of aquiring such rights , let us say
for 10 years for a given trademark , the trademark is protected for 10
years, even if the company stops activities after 5 years.
Perhaps it depends on the country.
> I am reasonably certain it does
> not belong to any of the other people on the team that wrote it.
As far as I know it belongs to one person, namely to R.Swartz.
Andrzej
Oliver White
> Użytkownik Oliver White napisał:
> Copyright rights are valid even if commercial entity does not exist any
> more.For example if at the moment of aquiring such rights , let us say
> for 10 years for a given trademark , the trademark is protected for 10
> years, even if the company stops activities after 5 years.
> Perhaps it depends on the country.
Granted. I know it was written in Chicago, and patented there, and
therefore it applies to the same rules as the rest of the United States
patent law. However, I was under the impression he chose to release the
system, however, I can no longer find any reference to that, so it could
only be wishful thinking.
The MKS comment was to dispel a speculation I've seen before, and patents
are often sold in order to pay of debts of a bankrupt company.
Ah well, point is, we're no more knowledge than before.
Andrzej Popielewicz
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:59:39 +0200, Andrzej Popielewicz wrote:
>>Użytkownik Oliver White napisał:
> Granted. I know it was written in Chicago, and patented there, and
To be precise , copyright differs from patent and trademark. Patent and
trademark has a definite time limit. Copyright protection , if
copyrighted in Copyright Office of USA (Library of Congress) is also
time limited.
But imagine that You publish Your source program with Your own copyright
notice.
I would suspect , no one else , even after 50 years cannot claim and
aquire the ownership of the program without the permission of the author
(?).Even if You have not copyrighted or patented it officially in any
official entity.
It is clear that patenting or officially copyrighting makes life easier
and sometimes is neccessary to diminish some risks.
BTW as far as I know You cannot patent something , that was already
published.
Generally it is rather a very complicated topic.
> The MKS comment was to dispel a speculation I've seen before, and patents
> are often sold in order to pay of debts
>
I asked once company, which according to Internet gossips has bought
some rights to Coherent or its famous manual. Their answer was, the
owner of all rights is Robert Swartz.
> Ah well, point is, we're no more knowledge than before.
Why ? The owner of Coherent is known, and he works on releasing its
sources under some license(according to emails I obtain from him).
Other too delicate knowledge is not relevant to us.
Markus E Leypold
Andrzej Popielewicz <va...@icpnet.pl> writes:
That also was my understanding. Of course I don't know HOW EXACTLY MWC
folded: If there were unsatisfied creditors one might stipulate that,
since the right to the code was an asset of the company, that the
creditors had (still have?) a right to that asset and so on. But: When
I did some research on this at the end of the nineties and tried (w/o
success) to contact Robert Swarttz (the founder and former owner of
MWC), the consensus seems to have been that the rights reverted to RS
at the time of closing MWC. There is even a text file announcing the
closing of MWC floating around somewhere together with a notice that
all rights to Coherent are retained (by RS I think). I seem not to be
able to find that file any more (not any of the mirrors of the old
Raven + Silver servers in which it was contained I think).
The statement at http://www.search.com/reference/Coherent_(operating_system)
At some point after the death of MWC, Coherent was released as Open
Source software. While it does not have the features of a modern
Unix-like OS such as Linux, it is still a viable solution for those
looking to run Unix on a very old computer such as a 286-based
machine.
is AFAIK wrong.
That here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_%28operating_system%29
seems to me more to the point:
Some websites offer Coherent for download, although the copyright
status of it nowadays is unclear. While Coherent does not have the
features of a modern Unix-like OS such as Linux, it is still a
viable solution for those looking to run Unix on a very old
computer such as a 286-based machine.
So much is lost nowadays -- I'd really have appreciated something like
a general hobbyist license to prevent that from happening.
Ah -- here the file question is
ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/coherent/00_MWC_announce.txt:
This is to amplify my earlier posting. Please note that Coherent,
its sources, and its documentation and manual pages remain under
copyright. They may not be copied or distributed without the
written permission of Mark Williams Company.
A bit difficult to get written permission from an entity that doesn't
exist and Bob Swartz who wasn't really reachable for some time (and
still seems not to be able to make up his mind on the question of a
hobbyist license).
Robert Swartz, if you're reading this: Please, please, please, don't
let Coherent die completely. Some servers have already been closed
down years ago after people got mail from laywers in the aftermath of
the (at the time quite unclear aquisition) of the rights to the
coherent manual by some obscure company. The next event of that kind
(pulling the archives from the other 2 or 3 well known locations) will
bury Coherent for good. As a "software historian" that would pain me
really.
Regards -- Markus
Oliver White
> A bit difficult to get written permission from an entity that doesn't
> exist and Bob Swartz who wasn't really reachable for some time (and
> still seems not to be able to make up his mind on the question of a
> hobbyist license).
I was talking to Randall Howard a few days ago and he said that the
copyright was sold to Ron Lachman for $30 000. Apparently MWC never
bankrupted, simply was shut down because it was loosing too much money.
robert...@gmail.com
There been a few posting about the status of the copyrights of
Coherent and what the status of the assets of Mark Williams Company,
perhaps I can clarify things.
Mark Williams Company ceased operations and its assets became the
property of its bank. These assets which included the copyrights to
all Mark Williams Company's software were subsequently sold to
Kinetech. I was the person who managed these assets for Kinetech.
Early this year Kinetech sold all assets of Mark Williams to Open
Coherent LLC. A company of which I am the manager. The copyrights in
Coherent remain and are the property of Open Coherent LLC. At this
point in time we are working on how to making Coherent more generally
available and there should be more news on this shortly. If there are
any questions about Coherent or its copyrights I would be happy to
respond to them.
Thanks,
Robert Swartz
Udo Munk
> There been a few posting about the status of the copyrights of
> Coherent and what the status of the assets of Mark Williams Company,
> perhaps I can clarify things.
>
> Mark Williams Company ceased operations and its assets became the
> property of its bank. These assets which included the copyrights to
> all Mark Williams Company's software were subsequently sold to
> Kinetech. I was the person who managed these assets for Kinetech.
> Early this year Kinetech sold all assets of Mark Williams to Open
> Coherent LLC. A company of which I am the manager. The copyrights in
> Coherent remain and are the property of Open Coherent LLC. At this
> point in time we are working on how to making Coherent more generally
> available and there should be more news on this shortly. If there are
> any questions about Coherent or its copyrights I would be happy to
> respond to them.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Robert Swartz
Hi Bob,
nice to see that it's not completely dead and good luck with the Open
Coherent approach, maybe that works.
Best regards,
Udo
--
The fun is building it and then using it.
http://www.unix4fun.org/
Markus E Leypold
robert...@gmail.com writes:
Wow! Thanks. That was the word I wanted to hear in all these years. :-).
One question: There was some trouble some years ago, because,
supposedly, the rights to the Coherent manuals (excellent for their
time!) had been sold seperately. The company (supposedly) buying them,
wrote some lawyerly letters to some people maintaining mirrors of the
former raven and silver servers, those then shut down the servers
(partly out of annoyance). The problem then was, that the letters
where quite vague on the kind of violation and which rights the
company from which the letters originated really had. Later it
perspired that they probably had only bought the rights to the
manuals, but that all was a bit fuzzy (unfortunately I also don't
rembember the name of the company buying the rights, but the rumor was
they had intented to rewrite the Coherent manuals to some sort of
Linux manuals).
But that might all be wrong :-).
I'm not interested in coming to terms with what happened then (I've
got two legit copies of Coherent and stopped using them long ago, I'm
sad to report).
But what I would like to know: Have the rights to the manuals been
sold seperately? Or does Open Coherent LCC now also hold the rights to
the manuals?
Regards -- Markus
Andrzej Popielewicz
> robert...@gmail.com writes:
>
>
> But what I would like to know: Have the rights to the manuals been
> sold seperately? Or does Open Coherent LCC now also hold the rights to
> the manuals?
>
> Regards -- Markus
>
>
>
I am sure Robert will give the answer You want.
But why are You so interested in manual,as if the problem was in manual.
And as if only manual was interesting.
There are so many Unix documentation available now, and one could write
easily new one. One had to add many new pages, people are now interested
in other things than it was in 1990/93.For example X-window has now many
new features etc. Nonetheless I still use sometimes this
manual.Specially ddk manual is useful.
BTW , for many years , after the period You describe, I have seen in
Internet the Coherent manual available from Swartz family server. It
would suggest , that it was not sold. As far as I remember I have found
this server looking for stdio.h or something like that in yahoo.
Andrzej
Markus E Leypold
Andrzej Popielewicz <va...@icpnet.pl> writes:
> Markus E Leypold napisał(a):
>> robert...@gmail.com writes:
>>
>> But what I would like to know: Have the rights to the manuals been
>> sold seperately? Or does Open Coherent LCC now also hold the rights to
>> the manuals?
>> Regards -- Markus
>>
>>
>
> I am sure Robert will give the answer You want.
:-). I hope.
> But why are You so interested in manual,as if the problem was in
> manual. And as if only manual was interesting.
For one thing, the manual of Coherent was legendarily good: It would
be a pity if it were lost. For another thing, simply for histories
sake: I'd just like to know what happened.
> There are so many Unix documentation available now, and one could
> write easily new one.
If it is so easy, why is so many free software so badly documented?
(Closed software as well ...).
> One had to add many new pages, people are now interested in other
> things than it was in 1990/93.For example X-window has now many new
> features etc. Nonetheless I still use sometimes this
> manual.Specially ddk manual is useful.
> BTW , for many years , after the period You describe, I have seen in
> Internet the Coherent manual available from Swartz family server. It
> would suggest , that it was not sold.
As I gather this (the availability of scanned manual pages) must have
been the reason for the aformentioned lawyers' rampage. Perhaps I'm
exaggerating, but I remeber some people felt they were unjustly
harrassed.
> As far as I remember I have found this server looking for stdio.h or
> something like that in yahoo.
Yes, there was a lot of stuff around, then.
Regards -- Markus
Andrzej Popielewicz
> be a pity if it were lost.
It will be for sure not lost. I have full sources of it .Some persons
have it too.
I have tried to convert it to be usable with newer versions of gs, but
with no success.
But using old versions of gs etc, one could in principle print it once
again.Perhaps I try it out.
Andrzej
Joa~o Jerónimo
> Since Mark Williams Company failed however, the copyright likely belongs
> to something that doesn't exist, as I am reasonably sure that no one
> actually bought the copyright. As for the speculation that it at one point
> belonged to MKS (which I've seen on other groups) I can say for certain
> that it does not, nor to Randall Howard. I am reasonably certain it does
> not belong to any of the other people on the team that wrote it.
It thought that it fell in the category of abandonware, but now I see that
this term has no legal meaning...
JJ
João Jerónimo
> Wow! Thanks. That was the word I wanted to hear in all these years. :-).
Have there been any progresses on that Open Coherent LLC you know about?
JJ
development-2006-8...@andthatm-e-leypold.de
> Markus E Leypold wrote:
>> Wow! Thanks. That was the word I wanted to hear in all these years. :-).
>
> Have there been any progresses on that Open Coherent LLC you know about?
No. The person to ask should be Andrzej Popielewicz who is the only
one so far (AFAIK) with contact to Robert Swartz. I'm only at c.o.c
every some weeks, if at all. There is not much alive here any more --
even orginal Coherent users that where here 8 years ago seem to have
deserted the group. Personally I don't hop for any development
(actually given the fact that rumours have been around since at least
2001/2002 it might be rather unprobable), but we will see what
happens: Even if the source is release it might be under a license
that is contrary to a community forming around it and given the
embedded and whatever OS market (not: even netBSD has been replaced by
Linux) I seriously doubt Coherent has any viability in the
for-money-market as it is. In my judgment the only chance to keep it
alive would be a rather open license and (at least at the start) a
hobbyist or a research community forming around it). Unfortunately
that would have been more probable 8 years ago, when there were still
users around to whom Coherent actually meant anything.
Regards -- Markus