Slashdot Mirror
Legacy-Free PCs
JeffM2001 writes "InformationWeek is running a story by Fred Langa which gives an overview of the ways to create a true-Legacy-free computer. Finally we can have a PC not based on twenty year old technology." Update: 04/07 17:34 GMT by T : Pages past the first one of this article seem just to loop; here's the printable version, which has the whole article in one go.
the link to the article is broken and should be THIS
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
The URL supplied doesn't quite work. As it has a trailing slash when you access the page and click next page it goes to http://www....com//2 however their script doesn't like this so it serves up the front page again. To fix it delete the trailing backslash
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
If only we could RTFA... can't get past the first page of it, myself, and there are apparently 8 in there somewhere.
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
PowerPC G4 Chip.
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
It's got too many slashes preventing you from changing pages. Remove the slash at the end and it will work right. Here's the correct link:
0 003
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030404S
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
They are talking about eliminating the BIOS and serial, parallel and ISA devices.
I have a laptop (Toshiba 5100) with none of the aforementioned stuff.
Everything is controlled by ACPI.
I run Mandrake 9.0
I did have to patch the kernel myself, but it does indeed assign IRQs properly, and generally it just works.
That said, if you buy a unit that can boot into OS9 you can run just about everything Apple has ever made (even Apple I hardware and software) and just about everything any third party has ever made through some sort of adapter (PCI to nubus adapters even exist) - I don't know of a single thing other than the previous () hardware or software (natively or through emulation) that can't run on dual boot Mac.
All that said, the newest Macs are completely legacy free with both code (even though underpinned with BSD/Unix) and hardware. (USB/Firewire/Bluetooth/WiFi/Etc)
I don't know of any PC that can use EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVER MADE for the brand.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
debian does install with usb, you just have to boot the installer with the bf24 kernel instead of the old 2.2.19 default one
I've used EFI, it's used on IA64 and other systems today. EFI is a ROM-based mini-OS that can bootstrap other OSes off a network, a CD or, for example, a special boot partition on a HD.
This is a Good Thing. It let me edit the lilo.conf when I had an otherwise unworking IA64 Linux box...
Clear, Dark Skies
This is the unfortunate question. The idealist rolls out the next, best thing and the users looks at it and asks, "Does it run x?", where x is any of the legacy operating systems or software they are proficient and comfortable with. Way, way back there was this computer called Amiga, which was truly a work of art. Tragically it was in the hands of an executive and marketing group which was apparently from some other planet (remember the Superbowl ad?) The 2000 was the model which should have come out first and then it had this half-assed attempt to bridge systems, a PC card which bridged to an ISA bus. Expensive, indecisive, doomed. If Commodore had been lead by people with a real vision (the engineers sure had vision) it could be a system holding down a significant number of desktops.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, there is an alternative: APIC. Problem is, it doesn't work too well in Linux yet. (I can't boot my new dual-Athlon monster without the "noapic" boot option; the SCSI card'll freak out. Works in XP, though. :- )
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Yeah... like that USB -> serial adapter that works fine for generic use on my laptop, but blocks a 'BREAK' signal, making it COMPLETELY useless for resetting Cisco routers?
THAT is why I prefer a REAL serial port over some contraption somebody dreamed up.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
evolution n 1: a process in which something passes by degrees to a more advanced or mature stage; "the development of his ideas took many years"; "the evolution of Greek civilization"; "the slow development of her skill as a writer" [syn: development] 2: the sequence of events involved in the evolutionary development of a species or taxonomic group of organisms [syn: phylogeny, phylogenesis]
Evolution is not just applicable to living things. Where do you think Darwin got the name?
Install Mandrake on one set, then use a chrooted envoronment to install Gentoo on the other set. This has several advantages.
If the gentoo boot ISO doesn't support your motherboard, one or more of the kernel source ebuilds almost certainly does. The configuration of the working Mandrake kernel (and an lsmod to see what modules are installed, USB modules in particular) should go far in getting a Gentoo box up on that hardware.
I've done things like this for legacy-free tablets (which, while they work, don't have working digitizers yet under GNU/Linux, unlike the older Fujitsus which work flawlessly).
As an avid Gentoo user, both at work and at home, I've found the "two partition set" approach to be immensly helpful and useful.
Hope this helps!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
page 2. once you're there, links to page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 should work as well. looks like some kind of scripting error on their part. the extra '/' character was borking access to the next pages.
Wave upon wave of demented avengers March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
Oh, you did know that, right? You can download ELILO straight off Intel's EFI section. (An observant reader will notice that it's actually hosted by HP's research lab, although I can't actually find the info there.)
Of course, you can also read about EFI and Linux from RedHat.
I wouldn't worry, somehow. Plus EFI is mostly used with the new Itanium architecture. I'm sure Linux will be able to survive the impending DRM apocolypse.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I got a few results from Google: usb serial adapter mac
Will I retire or break 10K?
Or, you can just go to the printer-friendly page. One page format, and no ads. Fine, there's a banner ad at the top and bottom, but much fewer ads.
Legacy-Free PCs (printer friendly)
Interfacing to a UART is trivial. Much more trivial than with USB
Standard serial ports don't have a power supply with a well-specified current budget (you have to use wierd parasitic power supplies that don't always work on laptop serial ports).
Serial ports require negative voltages (more workarounds with switched-capacitor inverters).
Serial ports don't have a reliable way to detect plug and unplug events.
Serial ports don't have a standard way to identify the type of device plugged in.
Serial ports cannot be expanded and chained with hubs.
Serial ports require an interrupt per byte and are connected on the legacy ISA bus - each I/O cycle takes nearly a microsecond (thousands of cycles on a modern PC!). A USB controller is a bus-mastering PCI device with a scheduler driven by table data structures.
Serial ports are slower. Sure, USB 1.1 is not terribly fast at 12mbps but it was a design compromise to keep it cheap enough so you can build a mouse for less than $1 material cost.
Serial ports don't have isochronous transfer modes for timing-sensitive data like audio and modem signals.
A DB9 connector is less friendly than the USB connector. I hate those retaining screws.
A DB9 connector is not designed with recessed pins for better ESD protection.
A DB9 connector is not designed with data pins recessed farther than the power and ground pins for safe hot insertion and removal.
Serial ports use an antiquated notion of DCE and DTE to determine connector gender and everyone generally screws it up so gender changers are occasionally necessary.
Yes. A UART interface is trivial. Except when you have to find out why it's not working (oops, it's disabled or set up in the BIOS as an IRDA port).
Serial ports don't have predefined device classes so a variety of devices can use a standard driver.
Sure, all this comes at a certain price and the Microsoft implementation of USB PnP and standard device class drivers leaves something do be desired but it's generally an improvement over UARTs.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
It could be true that there is nothing wrong with the serial port to connect a modem. But the article said nothing about the most obsolete component in today's Intel PC - the processor itself. So we might see a PC with a fancy BIOS that comes with its own windowing system, but still has a processor with less than 10 general purpose registers. I know that Apple, Sun, AMD and so on probably underplay the significance of clock speed. But, 1GHZ PowerPC sure runs faster than 1GHZ P4. What we need is a modern, legacy free instruction set specially designed to support modern programming languages like C++ and Java. Large number of registers and hardware stack ("register windows") support is a start, but I am sure there are new ideas developed after Sparc design. What would an ideal machine language of today look like if it doesn't have to be remotely understandable by a human, only by the optimizing compiler. For example, if Intel's branch prediction, load/store reordering, parallel execution and so on are already specified by instructions themselves. And of course, this means starting anew with a single instruction set. No more emulating 8086, 80286, 80386 and so on in hardware. Software emulation, like 68K programs under MacOSX comes to mind, but I guess better legacy free all the way. Which means that the start is probably not a desktop PC, but a cheap, high-performance server. If you can have a Linux port, database server and a J2EE application server available, you might not care about the rest for your online store server if you get a better price/performance ratio. When the technology does come to desktop it will be probably covered with adapters, software emulation and even some bits of hardware emulation like a christmas tree and it will take years to whittle them away. Well, that's life.
AMD shipped (yes shipped) the worlds very first legac free PC. It has no ISA bus. It has no PS2 keyboard or mouse connectors, it had no serial ports, it had no floppy disk, it had no paralell port. It was cool. It was new. AMD did it. My team did it.
= zd nn
http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/amd3deasnowc.html
We did it before Compaq.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-516379.html?legacy
We did it before Dell
We did it before anyone.
It was a flop.
People still want floppy disks, paralell ports, and serial ports.
At least the ISA bus is dead.
Jibe!