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Installing Xenix on a 5162 or 5170

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lyonadmiral

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I'm wondering if anyone has any success (or failures) installing Xenix on their 5162 or 5170. I was lucky to acquire from Computer Reset IBM's branded Xenix 1.0 with install media. I follow the instructions but during the first few steps of the install process the screen goes blank (loss of sync signal) and the only way to get the computer to respond again is to cycle power.
 
Out of curiosity, what type of video card are you using? That almost sounds like an incompatible video card is being used.
 
IBM Xenix 1.00 known to be incompatible with many seemingly ordinary things, including VGA cards. Install on a 5170-099 or else at your frustration.
 
I am running IBM's Xenix 1.0 on my AT clone (286/12 with 4 MB RAM). To my knowledge, it's the only System III able to run on "standard" x86 hardware.

It is incredibly picky about hardware:
  • The EGA/VGA support does not work. You want to patch the installations disks.
    • My VGA card comes with a tool to force the card into CGA compatibility mode and reboot. Works for booter games, also works for Xenix.
  • The hard drive support is extremely limited, and you want to patch the installation disks for this as well:
    • type 1 (10 MB, 306/4/17), type 2 (20 MB, 615/4/17), and type 3 (30 MB, 615/6/17) should work fine
    • type 4 (60 MB, 915/8/17) does not match the AT BIOS geometry
    • other types will not work, because one drive table (kernel?) only has four entries
  • There is no support for 1.44 MB floppy drives, the installer doesn't understand the CMOS type.
    • You must have a 1.2 MB drive as first floppy drive. An additional 360K drive will be detected automatically.
  • Booting from hard disk may not work.
    • I have to boot from floppy and run "fd /xenix" at the boot prompt, which will then boot the installed system.
    • This issue also happens with PCem, even with the IBM ROMs. But it works fine in PCjs. Curious.
  • On a slightly newer 286 board, the system simply resets immediately after starting the kernel.
If it runs, it runs okay.

Even though C-Kermit supports this system (or tries to), I wasn't able to compile it - the Makefile is too large to be loaded by either "make" or "vi" (editing with ed is not much fun), and the compiler runs out of memory trying to compile the sources anyway. Compiling G-Kermit is possible, but I haven't been able to make it work. Serial speeds are limited to 9600 bps, and I haven't found a way to disable parity by default (getty seems to enforce "7 data bits, even parity").
 
You can patch the disks yourself, the OS/2 museum has everything needed: blog post and patch tool (python).

Note that IBM XENIX 1.0 is based on System III (= MS XENIX 3.0), while IBM XENIX 2.0 is based on System V (= MS XENIX 5.0). They are substantially different. Unfortunately, version numbering for the various Xenix releases is also all over the place.

The best Xenix option for your system would likely be SCO Xenix/286 2.3.2, which is based on System V and handles most hardware a bit better. There never was TCP/IP for this system, so networking is limited to UUCP or Micnet over serial lines.
 
Svenska said:
Even though C-Kermit supports this system (or tries to), I wasn't able to compile it - the Makefile is too large to be loaded by either "make" or "vi" (editing with ed is not much fun), and the compiler runs out of memory trying to compile the sources anyway. Compiling G-Kermit is possible, but I haven't been able to make it work. Serial speeds are limited to 9600 bps, and I haven't found a way to disable parity by default (getty seems to enforce "7 data bits, even parity").
Click to expand...

The archive page notes that the 16bit Unix variants such as Xenix and 2.xBSD may require an earlier release of C-Kermit due to lack of access to/testing on those platforms in recent years/decades: https://www.kermitproject.org/archive.html
 
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