Recently, I had the chance to get a book that described how to make OpenVMS work with Linux. Unfortunately, the entire book was 1) a list of screen-shots, and 2) about how to get OpenVMS 7 to act like (or interact with) Red Hat 7.
I was hoping for more details, and so on. I was also hoping for documentation on how to get Linux to support OpenVMS networking and data and so forth. The biggest project in this area is the Linux DECnet project, which wasn’t mentioned even once.
Well…. I went looking. I’m not a OpenVMS wizard (yet!) but there are many tools that seem to be quite nice, though many of them aren’t maintained any longer:
- CDROMS: an application (written by a fellow at SUSE!) to allow reading OpenVMS ODF CDs on Linux
- A DECnet network bridge
- A KDE IO slave for DECnet
- An authentication module for Linux that allows VMS users to use their VMS passwords on the Linux system
Support for DECnet is now included in the kernel, though the Linux DECnet Project still has some excellent documentation like this DECnet FAQ. There is a nice (though old) article about DECnet from Linux Journal.
Remember: I can’t vouch for any of these – it just seemed to me that projects like these are not likely to be known, and I wanted to get them out there.
One aside: it turns out there is a shop that provides VAX emulators, PDP-11 emulators, and Alpha emulators for running OpenVMS on Windows: Salem Automation Incorporated is probably best known for CHARON-VAX, though they have all of the others as well. There is a personal version of the CHARON Alpha Emulator. Again, I can’t vouch for them, but I do know that CHARON-VAX in the past seems to have been quite popular and well respected – but your experience may vary.
UNIX Administratosphere 
thank you!
the decnet faq link needs to be updated.
kind DEC regards