Slashdot Mirror

If anyone has any suggestions as to a Linux distro I could try (please bear in mind if over about 50Mbs it has to be from a resumable ftp server) that won't take all night on a 56k modem then I'd be most grateful. (Please remember to post the URL and/ or details of the ftp server).

What you want _probably_ isn't Linux. Take a look at NetBSD for that bad boy. I've got OpenBSD running on a PPro 200 with 32 megs of RAM, and it's great.

--saint

I want one, just to have a home server that is not x86, is this board really for real???

Depending on what type of server and how heavy of use it's going to be getting, then why bother with a $600 motherboard that you just have to buy more parts for anyways? If you're willing to do a little messing around, just get an old PowerMac for cheap (make sure it's at least a 2nd generation PowerMac as anything before doesn't have PCI, and try to avoid those with the 601 processor, especially the 7200.)

Although it's not quite the same thing that you want to use it for, my router is a PowerMac 7600/132 (604 processor at 132MHz, 92MB of RAM) which was purchased for ~30 USD (+ shipping). As of this post it's been running for 32 days, 7 hours and 24 minutes without any sort of problems.

Only possible problems are the hardware quirks, but NetBSD has a good model support page detailing most of them for anyone who wishes to run any *nix, and the fact that if there isn't enough storage space then you may have to pay a bit for it depending on whether or not the drives are SCSI or IDE. But, with PPC you tend to pay a bit more for the hardware anyways...

Either way, PenguinPPC is a good place to check out info on Linux on the PPC architecture. (And for old Mac owners, MkLinux is a good place to check for solutions to problems that may be missing from the documentation of your chosen distro (*cough*Debian*cough*) )

Finally some open Amiga PPC mother boards! Amiga returns....

Of course, there are already Amiga PPC expansion boards..

http://linux-apus.sourceforge.net/
and

http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/amigappc/

Anyone thought of porting these to daystar PPC upgrade cards for 68k macs (Turbo601 ?)

NetBSD is BSD on the edge, if its got a microprocessor NetBSD runs on it.

I should have added a link to the BSD family tree diagram.

more proof that linux is developed by children and childish adults, while real OSs are Developed by professionals.

its been said hundreds of times: linux is for children who hate microsoft, bsd is for people who love unix.

• 168 MHz MIPS processor
  
• 9.4" SVGA (64k colors) touch screen
  
• 78-key keyboard with a comfortable 17.5mm keypitch
  
• 32MB RAM
  
• Type II CF slot
  
• Type II PC Card slot
  

• 168 MHz MIPS processor
  
• 9.4" SVGA (64k colors) touch screen
  
• 78-key keyboard with a comfortable 17.5mm keypitch
  
• 32MB RAM
  
• Type II CF slot
  
• Type II PC Card slot
  

NetBSD's got a very nice rc (startup) system; as opposed to the monolithic (Open|Free)BSD approach, NetBSD's is a highly modular dependancy based model; no more giving scripts esoteric names like "000.wibble" to try to get it executed before "001.wobble"; just add a dependency in wobble on wibble and the rc system will make sure wibble is executed first.

There's an interesting PDF paper on the design and implimentation, some conciderably more terse and less interesting official documentation and a Daemon News article, and for those uber geeks, the CVS repository where you can compare with the other BSD's.

You'll note FreeBSD -CURRENT is looking at adopting it, while Open sticks with the tried and tested BSD4.4-type setup

And like other posters have mentioned, the MVME boards are nothing like a PowerMac. MacOS X isn't going to run on 'em anyways.

NetBSD is not completly on new grounds here [they already had PowerPC and VME code]. For the kind of application these machine runs, having a free OS alternative will be more usefull to companies than having something using a restrictive licence like Linux and Darwin.

Maybe you don't have to make your code run on an old VAX as well as a system with a ANSI-C compiler

Quote: None of this software may be downloaded or otherwise exported or re-exported into (or to a national or resident of) Cuba, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, North Korea, Iran, Syria or any other country to which the U.S. has embargoed goods. By downloading or using said software, you are agreeing to the foregoing and you are representing and warranting that you are not located in, under the control of, or a national or resident of any such country or on any such list.

So that basically leaves it on the user to not download something if they know they shouldn't.

Honest to god, with vintage hardware, if it doesn't have the mouse and keyboard, and every other proprietary piece, you're better off waiting.

even if you can't get ahold of (semi-) proprietary peripherals, these are "real machines" after all, and can be run from a serial port. I've got a stack of SGI challenge Ss in my basement that run this way.

My DECstation is still wanting the puck mouse and a copy of Ultrix 4.3

if you don't dig ultrix, (or can't get it,) NetBSD has been running on DECStations now for years. my main machine (DNS, HTTP, SMTP, SSH plus a handful of users) at home is a 5000/240 running NetBSD 1.4.3A and I have nothing but praise for its reliability. the hardware is easily capable of five-nines uptime and is very well engineered. even the smaller 2100s and 3100s can make reliable light servers.

And please. Don't ever butcher vintage hardware. [...]this really does make me sad.

The horror! :~( to think that perfectly functional machines still capable of useful work are getting destroyed and scrapped around the world everyday is bad enough, but if people start scrapping machines to cool cases? no respect.

visit thepoofygoof orphanarium for obsolete unix boxes

Personally I'm more farmilar with netBSD, there IPv6 package list can be viewed here.

Most of the BSD's also have great multicast support and mbone packages.. Jim

• 3com - no listings (no support???)
  
• Cisco Systems
  
• HP - no listings in network equipment
  
• Juniper Networks - OS support
  
• Linux IPv6 HOWTO
  
• Lucent - interesting
  
• NetBSD IPv6 docs
  
• Windows XP - Installing IPv6
  
• RFC 2492 - "IPv6 Over ATM Networks"
  

They basically just wrap an IPv4 wrapper around the IPv6 packet and send it back out across the net. A lot of network edge routers do similar types of things already, and many edge routers are doing IPv6 tunneling now.

Check out info about netBSD's IPv6 packages to see what solutions are already available and starting to become more wide spread.

... then you could've mentioned the OS that first brought UNIX to my home - starting on a Zip drive in a Mac LCIII: NetBSD.

I left the BSD world for Linux over a year ago, but I still get tired of seeing the world's most portable OS left out.

For some strange reason this message will probably be followed by trolls that sound a lot like {Net,*}BSD is dying. Ignore them.

:-)

NetBSD supports MOP and can be used to boot a DECstation (both the older MIPS based ones and the handful of Alpha based ones that use MOP).

Although this one throws in a few SPARC and VAX machines...

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/02/19/0 49208

And it seems the MIPS-based versions of the respective OSes are coming along; NetBSD will run on your O2. SGI's work on Linux for MIPS is as far as "only Indys have a working XFree86" although a few other machines will boot Linux.

An interesting question is what about the Cobalt MIPS-based appliances? Don't they run Linux as the x86 ones do? So where's the source code for those?

I have a DEC 3000/400 (no "station") that I got virtually for free a couple years back. I ran netbsd (which has much better hardware support on turbochannel machines than alpha linux, plus it's not linux ::ducks::) on it for a long time, it was a web, name, ftp server, you get the picture. 150 or more days uptime, only interrupted by power outages, and it ran in a closet so must have been at least 80 degrees F in there continuously. When I went to move it, I was puzzled at the sticky grey goo underneath the machine until I realized it had melted its plastic feet!

It's a great machine, incredibly reliable, unfortunately the days of these beasts being useful are past I think. It's just so cheap to get an x86 (or in my case an iBook with a dead screen) machine to replace them which is faster, cooler, more energy efficient, and quieter.

Of course the coolness factor of running this old workhorse still appeals to me, perhaps when I get a house with a basement (alleviating the noise and heat) I'll set it up once more.

I would be interested to see some comprehensive real-world benchmarks comparing the two platforms. Really, I'm rather tired of the "Megahertz-myth" PPC touters and the "RISC sucks" x86 campions arguing which is better without any solid numbers.

You could have done that a long time ago with NetBSD, probably the most portable OS in the world.

Oooooh, I forgot. IT'S NOT LINUX!

Much of OS X is closed source but Darwin, it's unix based core, is not. If doing a darwin port doesn't float your boat there is always OpenBSD or NetBSD or even Linux ports that will run on your IIsi cluster.

rofl, u assume someone is using ms just cos they dont like linux? thats kind of egocentric aint it?

Of course not! Everyone knows there are only two operating systems in existance, linux (may Allah bless it's name), and Windows.

Do you need to be sent to a re-education camp?

C-X C-S

NetBSD allready runs on this thing.

Here is the link.

yeah because it's so hard to get a bash prompt on a game console.

Go from a mostly working project to mostly not working project. Wow. That's progress.

To avoid the problem of Linus and the Linux kernel, I'll suggest here, here, or perhaps here You could even go get Debian/NetBSD, or Apple's Darwin if that floats your boat.

NetBSD runs on the Hammer already.

See the NetBSD/x86_64 port page.

] This got me thinking: Why can't I freeze down the process and thaw it back up at a later time?
It ought to be possible to take all the connected memory pages and save them in some way, preserve file handles and pointers, and everything.
Maybe net-connections would die, but that's understandable.

Time for you to read my notes on KaosBSD, it has a built in autosave which records the state of the programs it's running.
] Has any work been done in this field? If not, shouldn't there be? I'd like to contribute in some way, but I think it's a bit over my head.."
Just leave a note in my Journal or email me if you want something done.

] Laptops have been doing this in some form for years: most laptops, when they run out of power, or when told by the user will go into "suspend" mode which is similar to what the poster is describing, however outside of laptops, I haven't seen this done.
Sleeping processes also do something similar, sending their memory pages into swap so other running processes can use the memory. What, if anything, is preventing someone from taking this a step further?

I'm already doing this in KAOS, but it's different from suspend or sleep because it uses a status file to track the processes of every program.
This lets individual agents of any app crash and the other agents pickup what that agent was doing and keep your work, you don't lose it.
Say you're writing a report and the agent crashes, you might lose about a minutes work (depending on the autosave rate) instead of the hours you would lose by not saving in MS office.
Or maybe you're running a web browser with a dozen tabs on a window, then that agent crashes. You can then choose to start a new window with all those tabs loaded with the pages you were surfing, which is way better than trying to reload a browser by the history logs.

] by sklib: It's not possible to hibernate a single process. Maybe not in windows, but KAOS can hibernate a single process. You can pause it and then save the state file or hibernate which saves the state then quits.
] During thawing, to restore the process's memory structure, one would have to do one of two things: Either put the process *exactly* where it was before in system memory, which may not be possible because other programs (perhaps even the OS?) are running in that memory space now.
My system is different, it uses status files that say what it's doing. It wouldn't need to wrry about the memory use.
The other option is to reallocate new memory for the process, and then go through and fix every pointer in the process to point to new memory locations. I will remind you that this is not possible, because processes can do very strange things with pointers and it's not possible to keep track of all of them from the object code side.
The need to reallocate new memory is not a concern if you uses status files.

] Now, if the process could hibernate itself... well that's the same as hitting Save, and Exit in any program.
Which is why I have put hibernate in KAOS, I'm sick and tired of losing track of websites I'm surfing then trying to reload from history.
] So the only problem here is that programs that take weeks and/or months to compute stuff need to be written in such a way that you can save every once in a while, so when the power DOES go out, you don't lose that much of what you've processed.
Actually it's easier to write the OS so that programs autosave to a status file about once a minute regardless of if they are surfing websites or looking for little green men.

] In my opinion OS-level hibernation (which already exists for many windows versions, and seems like it should exist for those big mainframes) coupled with some smart programming (no intractable problems here)
I'm programming KaosBSD which can run on anything OpenBSD knows about and maybe port it to some of the things NetBSD supports.
The smart programming is the status manager which all apps can use to autosave.
This is part of the unique way that apps run as part of the system. It can also offer other app services inside your app.
The best example is the calculator, it can popup as a panel you use in any app.
] would put a thorough end to these shenanigans with losing months of processing time just because the power went out 5 minutes before it finished.
Yes, I've run Seti@home and had that happen dozens of times. It always annoys me to see a day of processing go down the drain.

If what I have read onthe mailing lists is any indication, it is unlikely Theo will lose control (well, of teh project anyway :) ). Most seemed to agree that this kind of stunt is exactly what Darren was trying to pull when he put the offending clause in the license in the first place. And regardless of how people feel, it seems the "Official" OpenBSD is still more trusted.

NetBSD out of business? What? Are you smoking Moderator crack, Mr. Troll? Besides, Theo was locked out of the NetBSD project and waited almost a year (holding the only Sparc port BTW) before coming out with OpenBSD. It is not the same situation.

there is support in -current for SMP on i386, VAX, and alpha. (links are to old posts in tech-kern.) work is in progress for sparc, mips, and maybe a few others. (m68k?)

one of the goals is to get SMP branches merged back into the trunk for 1.6.

there is support in -current for SMP on i386, VAX, and alpha. (links are to old posts in tech-kern.) work is in progress for sparc, mips, and maybe a few others. (m68k?)

one of the goals is to get SMP branches merged back into the trunk for 1.6.

there is support in -current for SMP on i386, VAX, and alpha. (links are to old posts in tech-kern.) work is in progress for sparc, mips, and maybe a few others. (m68k?)

one of the goals is to get SMP branches merged back into the trunk for 1.6.

"Of course it runs NetBSD."

The Jornada 52x and the 54x use the Hitachi SH3 processor (as stated here) and not the StrongARM processor which is the one that you linked you. The link to the NetBSD/hpcsh port is http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/hpcsh/. I'm not sure if that port supports the 52x nor the 54x or not... if it does, then I might have a use for my unused 545 ;-)

I don't know about Linux, but there is active development of NetBSD (NetBSD/hpcarm) that runs on Jornada 525. I have not tried it, though, so I'm not sure of the current status. Here is the web page: www.netbsd.org/Ports/hpcarm . There is also a guy (in Germany I think) named Keuchel Rainer that has ported lots of UNIX-type tools to Windows CE (focusing on Jornada 720). This includes many command line tools such as tar, telnet, gzip, rsh, etc.. plus Perl (!) and an X Server (!!). Perl seems to work well, but aparently thare are a few limitations due to the WinCE operating system, but I have not had any problems yet, probably because I still a newbie when it comes to Perl :-) The X server also works well (although a little slow) and includes some ported X apps, such as twm, xeyes, xedit, xcalc, and xpdf. I have not yet tried it with remote X apps, but i'm sure it works. He has also ported emacs to CE! Check it out: www.rainer-keuchel.de(click on Software at the bottom).
There is also a Yahoo! winCE dev group (started by Mr. Rainer: groups.yahoo.com/group/wince-devel If you find out about a Linux port, post it! :-)

I assume you already looked here?

It's just the first thing that came up from Google.

That said, IMHO, a DC that isn't being used to play Virtua Tennis is a DC that's being sorely mistreated - unless it's an extra DC of course :-)

If installing Linux, I suggest Debian GNU/Linux. I've had better luck with their distro on PPC Macs than other distributions. (Maybe I'm just more used to apt than RPM.)

You might also want to check out MacOnLinux, which lets you run MacOS on top of Linux.

Finally, there's always Darwin and X Windows!

Mac OS X (currently at version 10.1.2) is a fine UNIX-like operating system, which uses a customized Mach mikrokernel and BSD libraries and userland utilities, as well as Apple APIs Carbon and Cocoa, to provide a replacement for Mac OS 9 as a next-generation operating system on Mac hardware. Give it RAM.

NetBSD also runs on Macs, and the suppor is very good. AFAIK, the port is in the main tree and development is at the typical moderate rate. I've never used it but of course it's BSD so it could make a good server OS choice, and it's another OS to throw into the mix.

Linux comes in many flavors for the Mac; as I recall most of the major players have PPC or Mac versions and a few minor ones do as well. SuSe, YDL, LinuxPPC, and a lot more are available. Since you read /. I don't think I have to go in to what Linux is or can do, so just point your browser to the LinuxPPC.org site for info down that avenue.

Seems to be lots of NetBSD articles in there; maybe you should switch to a Real OS ?!?!?

Well, it isn't free as in speech, cause we don't get source code, which means it is x86 only (amoung other issues).

It's O.K. for it to run on x86 only. The focus of FreeBSD is to run as well as possible on x86 machines. If you want to run on other architectures, try NetBSD whose motto is ``Of course it runs NetBSD.''

If I really wanted to run a single OS on all my machines I would check this out NetBSD

I see UltraSPARC, HP 9000, Alpha, RS/6000 and i386 among other things that you may or may not own

The various varieties of BSD grew out of work at UC Berkley. They received a copy of AT&T unix and were allowed to develop their own version from it and distribute it (hence Berkley System Distribution). During the '90's BSD fragmented into several varieties. The best know are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Due to this fragmentation and the pull of Linux, development of the various branches of BSD is slower. Because the various BSD communities are smaller, you can get a little more personal attention from people actually developing it.

BSD, being a true Unix is generally considered to be more stable and able to scale better for enterprise use. Linux is generally used for midsize servers.

For more info on BSD check out NetBSD.

There was some discussion about Linux running on PS2 at a TFUG meeting last night. Someone asked if NetBSD had been ported to it yet. The only reason Linux beat NetBSD in being the first to run on PS2 was because of the big corporate push. I'm not knocking Linux, it's just that the NetBSD developers have _ALOT_ more experience with porting an OS to different architectures (it has currently been ported to 46!!).

How much is someone willing to bet that NetBSD will beat Linux in being the first OS to run on an XBox?

once the nokia Netbsd port is done, we'll be able to protect our phones using ipf (or maybe even a pf port, if the ipf license still isn't to your liking) and should be fine.

• Fortunately, you
• are wrong. You must feel greatly relieved.
• MacOS X
• Solaris 8 for Sparc
• NetBSD

Really, I'm just talking about the install. Something with some graphical flair, built-in help system for new users, and a game or two, or a little slideshow, or some interesting history text files, *something* built in to play while slow parts of the install proceed.

Try leadership@apple.com and see if you can get them to slip Breakout or some decent reading material (like a bunch of Bill Gates jokes) into the next MacOS X installer. You have an iBook, and today's just might follow through on it. Solaris, incidently, will let you goof off in the shell in a seperate window and has graphical on-line help during the install. No tetris though, unless you provide it yourself on a floppy disk. NetBSD makes you wait to play Tetris until the install finishes, and even then it hides them in /usr/games, which is not in the default path. These NetBSD guys are all business, sheesh. ;-)

Have fun.

Anyone using wu-ftpd has only themselves to blaim if anything happends to their servers. This application has a bug history making Microsoft look like what OpenBSD claims to be. There are many free and secure and certainly more extensible options available, so why distros still stick with wu is beyond my understanding.

As for a link to sega removing CD-boot functionality check The NetBSD DC howto. Note the first requirement that the DC be manufactured before September 2000. While the requirement says that SOME of the newer consoles still work, they were likely old stock boards that didn't have the functionality removed. I think that the Boob site has some comments on the newer DC's not booting CD s, but it appears to have been /.'ed.

Real Bourne Shell will be released as source code sooner or later by Caldera. Here is the press release:

http://news.linuxprogramming.com/news_story.php3?l tsn=2001-08-20-003-06-CD

http://ir.caldera.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID= 57417

And here are some quotes:

"The Regular Expression library and tools will be made publicly available on SourceForge this week at http://unixtools.sourceforge.net. In coming months, Caldera will Open Source other UNIX tools and utilities, including pkgmk, pkgadd, pkgrm, pkginfo, pkgproto and more, as well as the Bourne shell, lex, yacc, sed, m4 and make. The licenses under which these technologies will be Open Sourced will be decided based on community and business needs."

So, you must keep you eyes on this:

http://unixtools.sourceforge.net/

Meanwhile you can do portable shell-scripting with help from these WWW-pages:

http://www.raycosoft.com/rayco/support/porting.htm l

http://www.raycosoft.com/rayco/support/SANS_2001_f iles/v3_document.htm

http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/

http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/autobook/autobo ok_208.html

Ash is really good Bourne Shell clone and POSIX-shell implementation. I really like to use it for my shell-scripting, because it prevents me from using bashisms. In my Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 Potato /bin/sh is actually a symlink to ash that I compiled from sources I took from unstable Debian and it works.

But if /bin/sh is symlink to bash and you have some bashisms in you script that starts "#!/bin/sh", it seems, that even in that case bash won't complain about those bashisms.

But you must check out, which version of ash you are running. Debian has always used the latest version of ash. I think it is downloaded from this place:

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src /bin/sh/

Red Hat Linux had ash version 0.2 and it really sucks. Then I made bugreports and latest versions of Red Hat have fresher version of ash.

But it seems, that Slackware still has that ash version 0.2:

ncftp ...ware-8.0/source/ap/ash > pwd
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/mirrors/slackware/slac kware-8.0/source/ap/ash/
ncftp ...ware-8.0/source/ap/ash > ls
ash-linux-0.2.diff.gz _ash.tar.gz
ash-linux-0.2.tar.gz SlackBuild
ncftp ...ware-8.0/source/ap/ash >

BTW I really don't understand, why somebody would want to create installer scripts, when this kind of tool exists: http://www.easysw.com/epm/

EPM Is:

A free UNIX software/file packaging program that generates distribution archives from a list of files. EPM Can:

Generate portable script-based distribution packages complete with installation and removal scripts. Generate vendor distributions in AIX, BSD, Compaq Tru64, Debian, HP-UX, IRIX, Red Hat, and Solaris formats. Provide a complete, cross-platform software distribution solution for your applications.