My Own Little IBM Mainframe

After Jeff insisted that I try out the Hercules zSeries emulator, I downloaded it and installed Linux on it with the help of his tutorial on how to install Debian on Hercules. It took all day, but now I have a spiffy little emulated mainframe to play around with.

$ uname -a
Linux manwe 2.6.18-5-s390 #1 SMP Sat Dec 22 21:05:05 UTC 2007 s390 GNU/Linux

It's really dead simple to do, if you follow the instructions correctly. My host system is Debian Etch, and I'm running it on a Core 2 Duo machine with 2 gigabytes of RAM. It's relatively snappy, despite being an emulated system. Currently it's running a 31-bit kernel, but you can also run a 64-bit one as well.