z/MOE - Hercules based OS

Keven Tipping

Dec 24, 2007

Greetings to all.

Recently stumbled across Hercules, great program- haven't had this
much fun working with an open sourced program for quite some time.

Anyways- I just wanted to gauge the interest in a "Hercules OS". I
might just do it for my own uses anyways, but I'd like to know if
anyone else is interested in such a system.

I was thinking of creating a seriously cut-down distribution of Linux
(under 256MB) specifically for booting Hercules, hence the name- z/
Mainframe Operating Environment. Off the top of my head, the distro
would contain the following features:

- Hercules 3.05
- EVMS for local RAID management (software)
- h3270 for HTTP-based 3270 Terminal Emulation
- Web based SSH applet (for Linux access & service)
- New Hercules HTTP user interface (I can hardly read the buttons in
the current UI at the top)
- Custom web portal to branch out to HMC/h3270/SSH, and upgrade the OS
itself

There would be no X or graphical environment, and likely no package
management either. The entire thing would basically be comprised of a
kernel, initramfs, and a squashfs for the OS data, all stored in /
boot. The rest of the system (disk wise) would be whatever Hercules
needs it for. Technically, it would be better to just write the entire
distro to a IDE flash drive or a SATA<->CF adapter, boot from that,
and all the local disks are used for the mainframe side of things only.

Anyways- is anyone interested in this? The only issue I see is that
it's going to want a dedicated system- and figuring that my Mac Pro
only pulls about 75MIPS, I'm guessing it would require a reasonably
fast PC to achieve any decent speed.

Cheerio.
-KT

1:45 am

Re: z/MOE - Hercules based OS

Roger Bowler

Dec 24, 2007

--- In hercules-390@yahoogroups.com, Keven Tipping (bytelogix) wrote:
> I was thinking of creating a seriously cut-down distribution of
> Linux (under 256MB) specifically for booting Hercules, hence the
> name- z/Mainframe Operating Environment.
...
> Anyways- is anyone interested in this? The only issue I see is that
> it's going to want a dedicated system-

I for one would welcome such a system. I always envisaged that
Hercules would run on a dedicated PC with a minimal version of Linux
driving it. But creating a new distribution is a non-trivial task, and
most people seemed to prefer Hercules running on their regular desktop
machine. But even if I'm in the minority, I still consider that
Hercules deserves to run on its own dedicated machine :-)

Regards,
Roger Bowler
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/rbowler
Hercules "the people's mainframe"

4:33 pm