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HP To Sell PCs With Mandrake 9.1
theoddball writes "HP just announced a new PC model (HP Compaq d220) that's available preloaded with Windows or Mandrake 9.1. The machine appears to be targeted to business users, although it's on the lower-end of the scale - specs are here. Mandrake also has a press release announcing the deal, which will grow to include four other HP models. Is this a sign that top tier manufacturers are taking Linux more seriously, or at least seeing a profitable niche?" We commented on MandrakeSoft's status update yesterday.
Despite the fact that Linux is apparently not ready yet for "mum" (certainly because of a lack of third-party applications), it really seems there is a growing momentum for Linux on the desktop in the field of corporate environements. My guess is that StarOffice/OpenOffice.org are responsible for that, and also that Mandrake 9.1, with its great desktop environment, offers most things that corporations need for their daily tasks. This includes OpenOffice.org and Mozilla for instance.
If you try to buy a d220 microtower, there's no option available yet with Mandrake Linux. If they're going to do a press release, isn't it better to have the actual product first?
Signatures are supposed to be funny?
I think the article said that the Linux offer will be on HP's website Monday.
Install vigor.
Just a small point, but Mandrake started out as Red Hat+KDE. This is no longer true, of course, but it's still largely a Red Hat clone in many aspects.
My journal has hot
He was talking about iPaq, the Pocket PC PDA, not the Compaq desktop. It is definitely not old stuff, because HP never even announced to ship a Pocket PC with Linux pre-installed.
If you check the prices, you will see that they come with no tax:
HP-Compaq D220 with MS-WindowsXP: $429
HP-Compaq D220 with Mandrake 9.1: $349
For MDK 9.1: "Customized solutions, available beginning July 7, start at an estimated U.S. street price of $349"
See price for MS-W-XP: "starting at: $429.00*"
My question is: when will they be available in Europe? Peace!
Sorry, the Commodore 64 did have 64K of RAM. It also had (I believe) 20K of ROM (8K BASIC interpreter, 8K kernel ROM and 4K character ROM) mapped in at various addresses. However, the RAM "underneath" the ROMs is available, but only in machine language.
The BASIC interpreter is mapped in at $A000, the character ROM is mapped in at $D000 (I think, I don't quite remember), and the kernel ROM is mapped in at $E000. Due to the way that the VIC-II works, being able to access only 16K at a time, the character ROM is also mapped in at $1000 and $9000, but only the VIC-II sees it this way, the 6510 sees the RAM there.
Now then, to map out the ROM's, you need to play with the MMU, which is at memory location 1. Also, like I said, you have to be in machine language, because using any of these methods, you end up mapping out either the BASIC interpreter, BASIC and the kernel, or all of the ROM's, and if you're in BASIC, unless you've copied the ROM to RAM, you'll crash the machine.
These values will work, although you shouldn't just set them, since they also set some of the Datasette lines as well. Set the MMU (memory location 1) to these values to get the RAM:
$36: Map in the RAM under the BASIC interpreter (8K at $A000)
$35: Map in the RAM under the BASIC interpreter (8k at $A000) and under the kernel (8K at $E000)
$34: All 64K of RAM.
There are other values as well, but I don't remember how they work, as I didn't use them very often.
Note that when you map out the kernel or use all 64K of RAM, you MUST disable interrupts. The 6510, when it receives an interrupt, jumps to the vector pointed at $FFFC ($FFFA for NMI's), and for IRQ, this is $EA31 (I don't remember the NMI). If the CPU does it's JMP($FFFC), and there's garbage there, well, your C64 goes off into
never-never land.
Also when you map in all 64K of memory, you only have about 63K of memory. That's because most of zero page (0-255) is reserved, $100-$200 is the stack (you don't want to mess with that unless you really know what you're doing), and $300 contains some semi-important pointers (file I/O, IRQ, etc.). But from $400 up, you're all clear.
Of interesting note... The game Impossible Mission (by Epyx) used all but 1K of RAM. And yes, I'm a former C64 demo coder, I've set the machine to use all 64K of RAM many times.
-- Joe