Hi John. I had looked into this a while back. I got to know a little bit about the system (though not nearly enough). So perhaps I can provide a little more info to get this going.
Picker released software called Odyssey that runs on a few different DEC machines. Most of the machines we use are branded 'Odyssey FX xxx,' where xxx is a different model number (830, etc). My system happens to be an Personal Alpha Workstation 500au, but at least one other colleague uses an even older machine that they branded as a 'VP' (in constrast to the FX Series). In regards to the info about PersonalAlpha by Stromasys, I believe that that emulator (is that the correct word?) is akin to the VP series, whereas FreeAXP emulates one of the FX series.
From what I know about the installation, 3 partitions are used: the rz16a partition is mounted as root, the rz16g partition as the storage area (including the Odyssey software), and the rz16b partition as a swap space. Any additional hard drives have their rzXXc partitions mounted and are used only for additional hd space. There are also optical, tape, and cdrom drives. There are additional ports for camera hookups but I don't know anything about those.
The Odyssey installation disk installs the Odyssey software on top of a (customized?) Digital Unix 4.0D kernel. As a true newbie, it's difficult for me to know where the Odyssey sits in terms of the OS (I have been using Windows my entire life (gasp!). The installation also installs the X Window system on the computer during the process. The initial installation file checks the current DEC model. For example, when trying to install on PersonalAlpha (sorry for including your competitor in this post), the script declares that the current disk is only for the FX series (I don't have the VP installation disk). I was able to work around that by commenting out that check using sed, and I believe I completed the installation process, but upon reboot, it dropped me into single-user mode.
Previously, I had tried to install Odyssey on FreeAXP. When installation finally began after all the initial questions, the system would hang (I would get the CAM_Logger error similar to this post). Recently, I attempted again and was surprised to discover that the installation proceeded. I ran into a few issues. First, the installation would check (or write?) blocks, but then would err, saying that it ran out of room on the cylinder. I didn't run into this problem when using those 'canned rz distributions' you generously provided (however, those are quite small compared to what I'd perfer: >4G<img src='../images/smiley/cool.gif' alt='smiley'>. So recently, I (almost) successfully installed Odyssey on FreeAXP (and mucked it up when it didn't fully work - sorry). Installation completed with no errors reported, but upon reboot, I was dropped into single-user mode because it couldn't find the swap partition (note that the fstab file was correctly written and at the beginning of the installation it asks the user to choose a partition strategy (root size/swap size/image size).
To clarify the whole "img0" thing, Odyssey creates directories img0 through img15 in the root directory (and you can create more, up to img99). At installation, you choose one that is essentially your /usr path, and the others are used to mount other Odyssey workstations as NFS shares.
Perhaps this is naive to think, but I feel that without the X Window (or rather, any graphical system), the Odyssey is pointless. You mentioned that FreeAXP does not contain built-in graphics, and that you need an X Server like Cygwin/X. I have successfully exported my physical Odyssey display using MobaXTerm, and I can see my Odyssey desktop as if I were in front of it. I can run some of the programs. However, the main programs like viewing images using color stripes, etc (i.e. the [i:]main[/i:] programs of Odyssey) won't display, instead alerting me "control is already running" and "no shared key for control." Control is, I believe, the heart of the software - a control panel that controls all aspects of the imaging programs of Odyssey. Closing the control program on the physical Odyssey doesn't work. At one point, I disabled the shared key check by commenting out a line in the control program startup script that dictates running only one instance of the control program. The control program then runs (although not visually), but upon trying to start one of the graphic-intense programs, I get "X Error of Failed Request: Bad Atom..." on starting a different program, I get "no pseudocolors available." I have not been able to figure these errors out, perhaps you have a better understanding? My thinking is that I need to copy the custom color files (whatever those may be) into my X Server folder, but I don't really know what I'm actually to do.
