What's the intention with it - to install as a curiosity or to use to do something?

If the latter, it pains me to say it, but of those listed SCO UNIX would probably be the most flexible with options and extra software as they had x86 Unix flavours for decades (resulting in UnixWare in the late 90's/early 2000's) - well, until they imploded under their own lawsuit.

Xenix was relatively niche, and I really never had any experience of PC IX.

You've also got other early options like 386BSD and NetBSD also goes back on x86 a long way, too.

Wikipedia has a nice graphic of the Unix origins, showing some of the contemporary alternatives to those you've listed. Might be worth a look to see what else was about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix

megatron-uk wrote on 2023-09-09, 18:33:

What's the intention with it - to install as a curiosity or to use to do something? […]
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What's the intention with it - to install as a curiosity or to use to do something?

If the latter, it pains me to say it, but of those listed SCO UNIX would probably be the most flexible with options and extra software as they had x86 Unix flavours for decades (resulting in UnixWare in the late 90's/early 2000's) - well, until they imploded under their own lawsuit.

Xenix was relatively niche, and I really never had any experience of PC IX.

You've also got other early options like 386BSD and NetBSD also goes back on x86 a long way, too.

Wikipedia has a nice graphic of the Unix origins, showing some of the contemporary alternatives to those you've listed. Might be worth a look to see what else was about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix

Just as a curiosity 🙂

So I'll try with SCO Unix 3.2. I found 3.5'' images here: https://winworldpc.com/product/xenix/sysv-386-v3x

Thanks for the info btw 👍

I tried getting unix (whateverBSD) working on k6 a while back and either throughmy own inexperience (I have basically none with unix) or lack of cpu instructions was unable with any modern builds. May have to go back in time with the build versions to make it work

I've managed to install SCO UNIX SystemV/386 3.2 🙂

A floppy image is missing from the archive, so I couldn't install all additional packages, but anyway it's working fine.

Demetrio wrote on 2023-09-09, 05:01:

Hi, I have a 386SX build where I would like to install a version of UNIX. I've searched on the Internet for UNIX on x86 architec […]
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Hi,
I have a 386SX build where I would like to install a version of UNIX.
I've searched on the Internet for UNIX on x86 architectures and I've found:

• Interactive Unix (PC/IX)
• SCO Unix
• Microsoft Xenix

For now I'm oriented to Interactive Unix, version 4.1, because it's available here as 3.5'' floppy images: https://winworldpc.com/product/pc-ix/4x and I only have a 3.5'' floppy drive installed in the build.
Moreover, I'm looking for a version with the most similarities with the original AT&T UNIXes.

Maybe there are more alternatives, so I'm asking what would be the best option, considering also hardware compatibility?

These are the PC specs:

• CPU: Am386SX 33MHz
• RAM: 4MB
• Video: Trident TVGA8900C 1MB
• Audio: Aztech MM Pro 16IIIS
• Storage: IBM H3342 342MB HDD + 3,5" Floppy Drive

I tried out FreeBSD 4.11 on 386 (DX and SX) machine, it worked! But you need at least 16MB of RAM for installation
(8MB for work, IIRC). But you can install it at the another machine. I have test 20GB (yes, no problem with big
capacity, but root partition must be less than 500M) Quantum disk with FreeBSD 4.11 for testing 386+ hardware.

PS. Installation at the native machine might be done with 3 floppy and CD, average it will take ~4 hours.
Anyhow you also could try more earlier releases of FreeBSD.

how about Venix/86 for the IBM PC XT https://virtuallyfun.com/2015/08/14/venturcom … 86-on-messmame/

Demetrio wrote on 2023-09-10, 13:31:

I've managed to install SCO UNIX SystemV/386 3.2 🙂

A floppy image is missing from the archive, so I couldn't install all additional packages, but anyway it's working fine.

https://archive.org/details/scounixsystemv386r32v42

giantclam wrote on 2023-09-19, 04:47:

Demetrio wrote on 2023-09-10, 13:31:

I've managed to install SCO UNIX SystemV/386 3.2 🙂

A floppy image is missing from the archive, so I couldn't install all additional packages, but anyway it's working fine.

https://archive.org/details/scounixsystemv386r32v42

This is the CD image.

BTW, I found the missing floppy image from here: https://fsck.technology/software/SCO/SCO%20Un … 03.2%20r3.2.4l/
It's the S10.TD0 tele-disk image; I had to convert it to floppy image with this tool: https://github.com/jmechnich/wteledsk and then change the signature in the img file to 3.2.4n.
The floppy images are tarballs so it was about extracting the content and changing the name of a folder (which makes the signature).

Pretty difficult process but it worked 😁 (it just gives some error on missing man docs but the binaries are installed successfully).

I will upload a zip with all the images as soon as possible 🙂

EDIT: File's too big so I uploaded it on Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qz1nk4w0orp90l … owzt4kxbno&dl=0