Slashdot Mirror
Contiki Ported To x86
lt writes "The ultra-small Contiki OS has now been ported to the x86. This should give those of you who have an old x86 PC that is too small to run even the smallest of Linux variants, a chance to browse the web, set up a web server, and doing other essential stuff. If you're curious to see how it looks, there is a live VNC demo running."
I have to say that running VNC on an 8bit computer is amazing. I would have looked at the screenshots, but actually playing around is so much more fun! It makes me want a C64 or old intel computer to run this on :) Does anyone know how to enter an arbitrary URI though, I couldn't do it.
:) Oh well, this will be the first article to ever slashdot a VNC server, I think.
On another note, for those who thought VNC over 100BaseT was slow, it's even slower when running at 3KiB/s
My other car is first.
Besides the nostalgia/geek factor of running a web browser on your C64 (which I've been doing for years, well cheating by using the 64 as a dumb terminal and running lynx)
Maybe a Contiki based PDA? Contiki based email stations? Seems you could make such things dirt cheap using this as the OS.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I think it also shows what can be done with limited resources. The deverloper has to create more efficiant code. In today's OSes, the bloat of the code is horrendous, ala windoze. Even the "cooler" OSes, like Linuz, have much code that is sub-optimal.
They say with faster CPUs and more memory will take care of that. Therefore, they can just keep piling on the crap code without thinking of resource constraints, i.e. - memory, cpu power. How long can this really last?
I commend the people who have worked on this OS. Some may see it as useless, I see it as hope that there will be better OSes built in the future, once the physical limits of the modern computer are reached.