Installing the Emulator: Ahoy, the Disruptor
November 15, 2012
Editor's Note: As soon as the freeware personal edition of the Stromasys 3000 emulator went live for downloading, I sent the FTP links to several HP 3000 veterans to see how well the installation worked for them. Before we'd follow through on helping to host this freeware, I wanted to see the state of the packaging. Allegro's Gavin Scott also installed it at our request, and his report appears in the forthcoming 3000 NewsWire print issue.
By Alan Yeo
ScreenJet
I'm not sure why I agreed to Install the Stromasys CHARON-HPA/3000 freeware. It's disruptive technology to the HP 3000 migration business that my company depends upon. However, as I have spent most of my working life using an HP 3000, it would be nice to always have one available after all the old hardware dies or becomes uneconomic to keep alive.
This is almost one of those stories that went nowhere. There seemed so many stupid obstacles to overcome that I almost gave up a few times -- and that was mainly down to lack of documentation that could have saved hours of work. There was also the fact that instead of wanting an emulated HP 3000 on my desktop, I wanted one on a server where a few of us could test drive it.
Hopefully, the lack of documentation last weekend will have been resolved by the time you try the freeware. But here, over today and tomorrow's articles, is the tale of getting my HP 3000 Emulator into the delivery room and smacking its little bottom until the first little colon prompt appeared.
Part 1: Getting things downloaded and installed, starting with a compatible VMware Player and a 2GB Stromasys file.
My only documentation for this was an email from Ron Seybold at the Newswire, with a link to a 2GB download on the Stromasys site.
Hardware requirements:
- Intel i7/i5 or Xeon CPU with SSE4.1 support; 2 GHz minimum, 3GHz or above recommended.
- 8 GB RAM minimum.
- dDsk space - 0.1 TB + space required to keep HP3K disk images.
- 20 GB is the minimum requirement for the freeware package.
- Two Ethernet ports.
This is the full 2GB VMware kit, uncompress and open with VMware Player. (And an FTP link followed)
CHARON HPPA runs under any of three supported 64-bit Linux Desktop distributions.
Ubuntu 11.10 is our recommended Linux distribution, and is available at no cost. Ubuntu 11.04 is also supported; versions 12.04 and 12.10 can also be used for testing. Fedora 16 Desktop Edition (64-bit). Fedora is available at no cost. Fedora 15 and 17 are also supported. Red Hat 6.2 (64-bit) is available at www.redhat.com; it is a commercial distribution.
Fortunately we have an Intel i7 server that already has Ubuntu 11.10 Desktop as the host OS. Unfortunately it has Virtualbox installed not VMware, and there were a number of horror stories on the net about running VMware and Virtualbox on the same host. This it turned out was not true, however your mileage may vary.
Downloading delights
So the first problem was getting the 2GB download. I don't have fast broadband, and to be honest I didn't see the "GB" and read it as "MB" (as who the hell downloads 2GB?) so it was a bit of a surprise when I browsed to the ftp location and started the download and was told it was going to take 23 hours! I think I looked at the screen for a few minutes just to let it sink in that it did say 23 hours and wasn't going to change its mind, it didn't and I killed the process.
The next day with the weekend looming I thought okay, I'll start the download to my PC in the evening and pick it up the following evening (if the connection has managed to stay up that long). This time it told me that it was only going to take just over five hours (don't know what had happened in the intervening day) but five hours meant I was able to check before bed, and as the download completed, plan to do some work on it the following day.
Saturday: The Second Shoot of the season, and me and the dogs were out after Pheasant and Duck, so "Sharon" was going to have to wait. Evening, glass of wine, let’s take a look at where to get this VMware Player thing. Find the VMware site, find the latest version downloads, Oh blast, another 200MB download. Ah I know, I'll logon to the i7 server and download it direct. Strange, if I went to the website from my PC with IE I was offered the downloads. If I browsed there from the i7 with Firefox I got the page, but no downloads offered. Since it is evening I can't be assed to find out why, so resort to downloading the correct Linux version for x86-64 to my PC, and will pick up the following day.
Sunday: Really nice sunny day, unlike the crap we have had for weeks, did I want to spend time working indoors? No, but if I didn't I might never get back to it. Fortunately as it transpired everything took so long and was so broken that all I had to do was wander back and check on progress every hour or so.
Okay I have this 2GB download I need to move from my PC to the i7 server. Easy I'll cut a CD, Windows refuses to copy the file! CD burning software refuses, nay, won't even show me the file to select! That's okay, I'll FTP it. Windows FTP won't even show me the file with a DIR let alone let me PUT it anywhere!
How do I move a 2GB file from my PC to the i7 server if I can't FTP it and can't burn a CD or DVD of it? I could try playing with my PC to see if I could share its drive and do an FTP GET from the i7, but life's too short. I then thought, I wonder what Reflection thinks of the file? Sure enough, it’s happy to show it, maybe it will transfer it? Where to? I need something with PCLink installed.
Ah what about an HP 3000? No problem, Reflection starts transferring the 2GB file (in Binary format Streams) to one of the HP 3000s. It says it’s going to take a fair while even over a 10MB link, but the sun is shining and I can wait.
Becoming a VMware Player
Okay, let’s get this VMware Player set up on the i7 so it's ready and waiting. 200MB is easy to move via a memory stick. Got the file on the i7, follow instruction to right click and open with gedit, it’s a shell script file that it says will do everything for me, including extracting and installing VMware Player if it isn't already installed. Off we go, it has to process the file but shouldn't take long —this is an 3.4Ghz i7 quad core with 8GB RAM.
Time passes. Time passes. Look at the bottom line of the screen: it says it is processing line 450827 and counting, Time passes, the count is on 600 thousand and something! How many lines could there be in a 200MB file? Time passes, I wander back about 30 minutes later it’s on line one million one hundred thousand and something, and as I'm watching it pops up a box to say its finished, but it has an error with some of the characters, do I want to continue? in which case the result will probably be bad! Or do I want it to try a different character set encoding to translate the characters? Okay, says I, "have a go." Oh blast, it’s gone back to line one and started processing the whole frigging file again! Yep running just as slow, time to get outside and do some real work and come back in another hour and a half.
I notice that the Reflection transfer of the 2GB file has finished to the HP 3000, so now I need to get it from there to the i7. No problem: open an FTP connection from the i7 and get the file (binary) leave it running, go get that sunshine.
Pop back a couple of hours later. I have a nice 2GB "Sharon" HPA/3000 file on the i7, and the VMware Player extract has finished! But has the same error! Okay, so on the latest 200MB VMware 5 something is broken and won't install. Give up, or get a long spoon and ask the evil Goggle Empire what it might know.
Okay, lots of horror stories about getting VMware Player 5 running (or rather not) on Ubuntu 11.10. But quite a few people having success with the older Player 4.5 version. Browse to the links from the i7, and this time I can see the version 4 downloads! Select the latest, slightly smaller, and let the download run. Come back, it’s finished, and this time the file has a .bundle extension, so I click and run and it unpacks and installs like a dream,
What next? Okay, find the now-installed VMware Player, and run it, up it comes. But what do I do next (remember, I have NO documentation). It must have something to do with that 2GB file that has a GZ2 extension, so let’s try opening it. Right click, get offered an open by something, which I do and then get an "extract" option. Okay, in for a pound, in for a penny, so off we go, everything unpacks clean as a nut.
Okay, there must be something I select from VMware Player. I click open and browse to the directory where everything "Sharon" had unpacked, and it showed me a single file that it obviously thought it could use. I select it and click open, and wait. I get a warning that something is trying to open Ethernet1 in "promiscuous mode" but that it has been denied, and that if I want to read all about it, a web link was supplied.
At this point I have been playing fast and loose with a bunch of software, so I don't give a damn about something else being a bit promiscuous. Wow! I get a "Sharon" screen, and then a Putty terminal window opens in a bright green. (I start thinking Putty, that ain't going to do Block Mode) but low and behold in the Putty window I see an HP 3000 going through a recognisable boot sequence ending with an ISL> prompt.
Tomorrow: It looks like a HP 3000 Duck and quacks like one, too