Tech Notes: SunOS, Darwin, and NIS

Well, I think the SunOS explorations I was doing last week finally got me over the point of doing a video on NIS. I've got a script drafted, and I'm slowly getting a voiceover done and some footage put into it. By time this post goes out, I should be a good chunk into the production cycle.

I went and installed Ubuntu/arm64 in a VM which made running QEMU and capturing footage 'less annoying' than it had been with the last video. I'm hoping to make two videos to go out in March and April respectively. One of the things that's been on my project list is trying to recompile Darwin from Apple's published source code. I actually helped reconstruct Darwin 0.3 quite a few years ago with neozeed so I'm not exactly going into this blind.

Unfortunately, getting Mac OS X to behave in an emulator is very much proving to be an exercise in frustation. I asked for some help in Discord and Mastodon. If I can't get this solved, it will have to wait until whenever I can get the G5 hooked up again and ready to do some long compile jobs. I'm basically working on this when I can't find much motivation to work on other things. We'll see how far I actually get.

That said, video production stuff has been going slow. A lot of it is finding the energy to actually sit in DaVinci Resolve and edit. Unfortunately, to keep the content accessible, I need to do a lot of work, and it means that making a video can take several times longer than the original project did though.

I'm chipping at it, but the last week has been bad as far as sleep goes, and well, I have some big days coming up ahead which always makes things exciting.

Running SunOS has been interesting. I can easily see why some people would think Solaris might have been a step backwards. I'm not sure it will make it into the video, but I've also been experimenting with SunView, Sun's original graphics system before being replaced with OpenWindows and then CDE.

Seeing non-X stuff on UNIX is always fun, especially since SunView was one of the first used systems. Waterpear on Discord has been putting page out on the wiki: (https://wiki.restless.systems/wiki/Unix_Windowing_Systems) about these, so if want to know more, give it a look, and contribute a bit yourself.

As for Darwin, I got to be honest - the state of the preservation Apple related always just feels depressing.

Emulation support Apple stuff feels like its perpetually poor. Even when things do work, it often seems to be a matter of more luck than anything else. This is especially true if you're doing something even remotely slightly standard:  it often times requires going through a lot of hoops to do what on real hardware would be trivial.