State of accessibility on BSD systems

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

I've confirmed that NetBSD does in fact have binary packages for 
apparently all supported arches and has had them for several years.  The 
Vax packages haven't been maintained since 2005 from what I can gather 
but the I386 packages seem current.  The recommended thing is of course 
to build from source, but there are many binaries available for those 
who can't or don't want to.

Also, I checked and found at least one emulator called simh which claims 
to emulate the Vax but the microcode isn't available.  That's not the 
one I was thinking of but it would probably work.  All it needs is the 
standard C library so there should be no accessibility issues.  I'll 
find the other one if anyone else cares besides me.

I looked in Debian and there is no qemu-curses package.  The regular 
qemu requires X.  Even if Qemu has a curses setup, is that also 
supported in the guest OS?  In other words, can it not use a GUI when 
launching say DOS or the BSD installer?  When I tried it, I never got it 
to do anything at all.  My processor can't use kvm unfortunately.  Does 
anyone know about xen?  It can apparently run both BSD and Linux and has 
console tools for administration, but I don't know anything besides 
that.  Will it support multiple VMs such as a Linux host with BSD guest 
or does one need to reboot into a new OS?  How would one install BSD on 
a xen VM?  I suppose I should install the xen-docs-3.2 package but I 
would like to get a general idea of how it works and if it's accessible 
first.