Author: Justin Sherrill

Remember my Wyse terminal experiment with a DragonFly VM?  I mentioned an odd output pause where the screen would stop updating until there was keyboard activity – or occasionally just die.  That was an artifact of Virtualbox; running this now in Qemu has no such problem.

I now have a very overcomplicated clock!  I’m running GRDC on this Wyse-185 connected as a vt100 to the virtual machine running DragonFly 5.4 in Qemu on my Windows 10 work laptop.  It’s at 9600 baud so I can see the numbers morph.  I find this aesthetically satisfying.

DragonFly 5.4.2 is out.  My users@ post describes upgrading, as do the 5.4 release notes.  This release has the HAMMER2 fix mentioned here recently.  There’s a number of additional small changes listed in the tag commit.

Images are available for download at various mirrors, too. If you’ve recently upgraded to 5.4, it’s the normal build process.

I managed to find an ancient Wyse-185 terminal at my workplace today, left in the corner of the server room.  For entertainment purposes only, I booted DragonFly in VirtualBox and attached the physical terminal to the physical serial port on my Windows laptop docking station, mapped through to that virtual machine.

I have already discovered that the character output will often pause until the keyboard is used, which may be a settings issue.  Mash the keyboard enough and VirtualBox dies.  I’d use different emulation but Hyper-V doesn’t support serial and Qemu I haven’t figured out.

It’s entertaining, though I am not sure what I will do, other than maybe run GRDC once I figure out the reason for output pausing.