Niels Horn's Blog

Slack/390 11.0 - 64-bits: up and running!

February 14th, 2010 by Niels Horn in Hercules, Slack/390, Slackpkg, Slackware

Today Carnival started her in Brazil. Well, I'm Dutch so I don't care too much about all the festivities (it is a nice party though).

So what better to do than finally test the 64-bits version of Slack/390?

I wrote an 11-part post about installing Slack/390 on Hercules more than a year ago, and it is still valid and can be used for installing the newer version of Slack/390 as well - at least for about 90%.
I did encounter some problems though, but the 64-bits version of Slack/390 is still in the testing phase, so we should give it some credit.

What went wrong:

• The "ramdisk_size" from the supplied parmfile.txt is way too small, I made it 64000 to work
• Some packages were missing (sgml-tools / bin86 / clisp / gcc-gnat), but no show-stoppers
• The "etc" package was not installed, causing some problems with standard users and groups
• The symlink "sh" pointing to "bash" was missing, so none of the rc.* scripts would work (created it manually)
• The "/etc/slackware-version" file was missing

I managed to solve all problems one by one and installed SlackPkg from /extra afterwards to update my installation with the latest packages.
I sent my findings to the maintainers of Slack/390 to that future users won't have the same challenges that I had

I might write a new series of posts on installing Slack/390, with updated information, but I'll probably wait until the new version is a bit more stable.

For now, I'm having fun with my new 2x 64-bits emulated Mainframe running Slackware!