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LinuxBIOS Gets GUI
LWATCDR writes "Has a great write up on combining LinuxBios a Linux kernel, busybox, X, a window manager, and rxvt into a two meg flash chip. So what does get you? A six second boot time for one.
All sorts of uses come to mind. Terminals to use with the Linux Terminal server. A very fast booting embedded system like a Car computer. With every one pushing for multi-core cpus, mega gigabyte drives and many gigabytes of ram it is interesting to see how small you can go."
tfa is like 10 sentences - including this one The setup: LinuxBIOS + a Linux kernel + BusyBox + a tiny X11 server (Kdrive) + the Matchbox window manager + rxvt.(emphasis mine)
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I'm gonna take a wild stab in the dark and suggest they are using custom builds of the packages with optimizations turned off [or at least not towards unrolled code etc] and various elements removed [like all the drivers, support for the various bit depths, etc].
Just hazardin a guess...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I hope they weren't running their webserver with it.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Your misconception illustrates precisely why projects like this are awesome. No, the summary was not incorrect. They really did this in TWO MEBIBYTES. Two gigs would be completely non-impressive, you can fit any desktop linux distro in that. Doing it all without X in 1.44MB, with dozens of diagnostic tools, is common on rescue floppy distros. Adding an X server (*NOT* XFree or XOrg, mind you) in under 2MiB is impressive but not impossible.
This gives a whole new meaning to the word "embedded"!
Yes, but does it run... oh, never mind!
X.org is large, but there are other smaller implementations of X servers.
TinyX and Xvesa are two examples.
No, this is pretty much exactly what "embedded" meant all along.
While the X server was quite cool, I don't see what functionality it can bring at this stage of the game. I want to see a Linux BIOS that works for my hardware that allows me all the features of my existing BIOS. If you can do that with X, great! But right now, I want function over form. A text base menu like what I have now would be fine.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Small text, but plenty of hyperlinks, including a video of the system working.
For example, Xvnc only takes about 800KB compressed. Yes, it doesn't display, but bolting a framebuffer driver onto it would only take a few KB - in fact you could fit both Xvnc and a full featured vnc client into less than 1MB. There are at least a few small "proper" X servers (that drives a display instead of keeping it's own frame buffer) out there that would fit in 2MB too - I only mentions Xvnc since that's the only one I happen to have installed.
Explains a lot really :)
Two gigs? What do you need? Pre-downloaded pr0n?
I am not a crackpot.
Eh? Just how much space is on your typical RFID, anyway?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
This is just such a great project. It's absolutely awesome. Small, fast, cool: choose any three and rejoice!
If only I could just plug one of these into my PlayStation and boot Linux in 6 seconds, instead of the hours, reboots, and disc swaps to install Ubuntu on it.
In fact, what would be great would be a 2GB (maybe 4GB) Flash drive with minimal linux and gcc running on many different architectures, which loads the Linux source and recompiles for the host into which it's plugged. Maybe caching the last few, including the most popular PPC/x86/MIPS versions, which could of course be precompiled. There's probably a role for the Internet in updates, but running off the local drive will make the process much faster.
Ultimately I'd like to see all this run off the Flash in my mobile phone, booting the hosts off Bluetooth. That would take new BIOS'es for the hosts which could pair with Bluetooth and boot from it before booting the installed OS. Preferably all config'ed and run from an app in my phone.
--
make install -not war
There's a better quality video (i.e. a non-YouTube one) available at http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fornix/linuxbios. ogg
So.. it has come to this
Ahh...but then there's also FBUI, which is a full blown GUI system that runs as an in kernel module (~50k). Has some light weight libraries for interfacing with it. Would save tons more room than kdrive with all this other stuff. No networkable hooks though
Between this, and the Linux support for SIM cards, how long until we can make our own linux phone? A completely DIY phone might even tempt me to get one...
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / xenogamous.com / transference.org / quantam sufficit ]
But fast boot times have been available for years.
My car stereo (www.empeg.com) has been able to fast boot linux from flash for over 7 years.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The article does mention other applications like carr PC's, etc. but this could have lots of household PC uses. I would LOVE to have something like this, but for "consumer use", it would need to automatically boot, connect to the network using either presets or DHCP, and then present a menu (text or graphical--doesn't matter) displaying a list of available VNC and rdp servers to connect to (I use Windows primarily, so that's MY need, but Linux (aka X) connections could be useful too.) Then launch the graphical session.
Better still, let me just define a dedicated server, and have it auto-boot and connect.
My desire is to use older PC's as quick-booting "terminals" accessing Windows servers. Then, from the users' perspective, it's a seamless Windows environment.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Kdrive (referenced in this project) and TinyX are roughly the same thing. The name just changed once Keith Packard got it integrated into Xorg
...does it run Windows?
Sorry.
Indeed, it's well known and accepted that Mebioctets is the only correct word for this.
See for example http://zapatopi.net/labs/kibioctets.html
c++;
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these....
First if you are shutting down your car PC then you are doing it wrong. You use hibernate or sleep modes, shutting the thing down completely is the WRONG way to do it. What that I hear you say? your motherboard does not support linux hibernate? Your fault for using the wrong hardware.
You CAN get hardware thatdoes what you want, you CAN get hibernate to work EVEN on unsupported hardware, Software hibernate exists out there and is a patch for the linux kernel, works quite well and is fast.
6 second boot from bios is great, you are NOT getting the OS to boot to useability in 6 seconds with how most people have their Car PC install. I dont care what kind of voo-doo is going on in the bios. You have to roll your own embedded OS to get the incredibly boot times or use a stripped down slackware to get it done.
Honestly the Linux BIOS needs to focus on working on far more platforms and motherboards first and the flashy GUI last. I love it, we used it in an embedded design 4 years ago but for general use it's limited to a small subset of motherboards.
But the summary's example for CarPC use is not realistic, Designing for a automotive platform first and showhorning a standard PC in your car LAST is the solution to getting lightning fast boot times in a CarPC.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"who needs hard drives when you can fit everything in the BIOS just fine"
Explains a lot really
Micro-soft ?
I like how they are proud of having X and rxvt. What they may not realize is that you don't need X if you are just going to run a terminal emulator. Replacing rxvt by a useful graphical application (still staying under 2MiB) would make for a more convincing demo.
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
You didn't read TFA, did you.... It clearly says that it's running inside a 2MB BIOS chip.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Efforts to redefine? I think you are mistaken. Megabyte has meant "one million bytes" for far longer than the word byte has even existed. I am still pondering why YOU are trying to redefine it to mean anything else.
It's the BIOS they're talking about... so yes, it's 2 meg
He is not "trying" to. He is simply accepting that this already happened decades ago, and that there is no reason to do anything about this.
Replacing rxvt by a useful graphical application (still staying under 2MiB) would make for a more convincing demo.
Why? They just wanted to show that they are able to run X. The application you run under X makes no difference.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Motherboard support is the most important thing to be working on. I have wanted to use LinuxBIOS for > 5 years now, but the supported hardware list is laughably small.
Didn't know this annoying issue has finally been formalized the correct way. I really like it, although I doubt it will ever be of general use.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Given that is for a BIOS project, the primary goal is to load another OS off larger storage medium. So why an GUI? Easy, what do you do when your main OS fails? You reach for a bootable recovery CD or USB drive. Oh, but you aren't at home and didn't bring it with you! Gah! Oh wait, you can boot the BIOS in GUI mode and get on the internet and use a web browser and all sorts of stuff!
Even better, what happens when your grandmothers primary OS fails? Think she can use CLI tools and fsck the disk and other such things? What about a GUI where she can point and click through a diagnostic wizard? Maybe even click something to let you ssh in and fix it remotely?
Realistically, I don't think the setup will stay at 2Meg, but I don't think it will need to be more than 32Meg since you can have a fully useful PDA in 32Meg. And if more storage is needed, it can always be extended by using the "recovery partition" concept.
I'll admit that it's arguable that all this is necessary, but I'd argue that enabling the public to know if the issue is RAM or HDD or some other easily swapable part is necessary in taking the frustration out of owning a computer, as well as in reducing waste. There are too many people that don't know that memory can go bad and be replaced easily and that the computer itself is still quite useful. A diag wizard in the bios can fix this problem.
- Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
Someone should probably tell the mass storage manufacturers, they don't seem to have caught onto this memory addressing convenience thing at all.
My Apple ][+ boots to the OS in 1 second!
Whoa, a Linux BIOS with pre-downloaded pr0n! It would have an instant market! "From cold iron to pr0n in 6 seconds!"
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
...doesn't seem like it would be doing much system checking.
Of course, bad RAM is pretty much a thing of the past.
-rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Sure. Try here http://www.angelfire.com/linux/floorzat/2diskXwin. htm 2-Disk Linux.for a linux with x that will fit on two floppies, one for the base install and the second for x-windows.
They used to have a 1-Disk Linux distro that would fit on one floppy (1.72Mb?) with a tiny x-server, busybox, ed (an editor) and a web browser (dillo? elinks? I don't remember....) but I don't see it on the page anymore.
It is actually usable (I tried it) but I had some probs saving files to hard disk, IIRC. This was a long time ago, but the project looks still active.
I think the hard drive industry might disagree with you. Everyone says it's just a recent marketting gimmick to cheat people out of space, but every HD I have ever bought, since 20MB was "huge", was rated in decimal multiples.
Oh yeah, DVDs are measured in decimal multiples too. 4.7GB == 4700000000B.
You're just on the losing side of a very long argument. It probably won't be over until English is history, but it will end in our favor eventually.
Nope it is two megs. X.org is pretty big but there are smaller x servers available.
Anyone can get Linux running in 2 gigabytes of space.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Why is it asinine to ask people to use words in a way that makes sense? Simply because some people are too stupid and/or obstinate to use words as they are meant? I mean, that's a good argument, but I still think that accuracy is more important than your comfort level.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It reminds me of my old DOS days when I tried to map DOS into 1024 MBs of very fast level-2 cache on a Tyan Pentium-1 Motherboard. I never succeeded, but it booted quick and crashed faster!
I still run DOS (triple-booting with Mepis and Fedora) from time-to-time for WordPerfect and custom macros and it's right spritely on a Sempron-2800. DRDos 7.03 takes about 3 Mb.
Anyone have any idea? I'd really like to see some work in this area, because a lot of manufacturers fail to fix BIOS bugs (especially after a certain amount of time).
The SI prefixes kilo, mega, etc were in use long before they were used by the computing industry. Even within the industry, the SI prefixes are used when talking about mass storage and transmission speeds - the M in 100Mbps is 10^3, not 2^20, and similarly for hard drives.
Now personally I think that mebi, kibi, and the others sound stupid and would never use them myself, but I at least acknowledge the reality that megabyte means both 10^3bytes and 2^20bytes depending on the context, and as such is ambiguous.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Hope springs eternal, apparently. All your "team" needs to realize is that when a word is clumsy in pronunciation (such as mebibyte) people won't use it.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
It's not a recent gimmick at all, as your experience seems to demonstrate. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Did you just come back from the dentist or something?
Try it again after the novocaine wears off.
It's asinine because of the douchebag factor.
So you're talking to your uncle who's asking you, the family "computer genius", some questions about which memory module he should consider buying to upgrade his computer. You say something like, "well, I think that you should get at least two gibibytes total." Your uncle replies, "What's a gibibyte?" You proudly declare, "A gibibyte is 1,024 mebibytes, or two to the power of 30 bytes. Computers are binary machines, and memory is manufactured in sizes accordingly, not using base-10, which would yield 'megabytes' and 'gigabytes', which are 1 million and 1 billion bytes, respectively. Thus, when we talk about computer memory, we use mebibytes and gibibytes, even though manufacturers incorrectly use megabytes and gigabytes on their packaging."
Your uncle thanks you and after you depart he turns to your father and says, "what a douchebag."
Another reason to not use mebibyte and gibibyte or any of the baby-talk bytes, unless it's absolutely necessary, is that they're not recognized by Firefox's spell checker.
Next stop: making LinuxBIOS run on a sybian, with total scriptable control.
They're using KDrive, one of the build options of XFree/XOrg done by Keith Packard specifically for embedded or small targets. At my last job we were compiling that for a MIPS target, and the X executable came in at around 650k IIRC.
It's the support libraries and fonts that make an X install huge. Drop those and you can easily squeak in a busybox implementation in 2 Megs.
That being said - this is a fantastic hack. Everyone in the thread is thinking embedded computers for cars, but not me. I'm thinking Geode chips, PC/104 boards and industrial control.
And since I'm thinking about it, thank you Keith if you happen to read this. The other guy I was working with on this project actually got in touch with you over IRC and you helped us out with some problems we were having. Very nice of you to give us a hand - we really appreciated it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Just an FYI, KDrive *is* xorg. it's built from the official sources and is part of the source code tree and build system of xorg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kdrive
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
The title of the Slashdot article is completely incorrect and misleading.
The GUI shown is just a normal Linux GUI which runs after Linux has booted. The fact that its code is stored in the same flash device as the LinuxBIOS is just simple aggregation, and totally irrelevant.
It has nothing to do with the LinuxBIOS code at all, and it is certainly not a GUI for LinuxBIOS.
Great work in making it fit into 2 meg, but really bad Slashdot title.
Yes, it's true. The corporations who misused the SI prefixes all these years are staffed by douchebags.
Oh, that's not what you meant?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've been wanting a cheap laptop to essentially be a dedicated word processor for years. I hate waiting for a machine to load, and I abhor the distractions that a full service operating system offers while I'm trying to compose something. A command line interface and a 6 second boot time sound ideal to me. I can't be the only person who has an interest in a machine like this--witness the Alphasmart product line and its popularity with writers. If I had the ability to mass produce such machines, I would certainly try to market and sell them.
Aww, six seconds? But I want porn now!
This has less to do with SI and more to do with a way to approximate the values in semi-easy-to-understand binary/hexadecimal representations. Since 1,024 was close to 1,000, the idea of 1024 bytes being a binary equivalent to a "kilo" was not a large leap and it's easier to remember 0x400 bytes equals a kilobyte than 0x3E8 bytes, or that 0x100000 bytes instead of 0xF4240 equals a meg. As programmers(or at least us low level language programmers) we live and breath in the binary world and rarely have to think in decimal terms comparatively.
What kills me is that I'm betting that a large majority of people who argue for the 1,000 byte kilobyte will gladly accept "ginormous", "omgwtfbbq" "aiiiggghttt"and "teh" and all the other language abuses and will see absolutely nothing wrong with their use. I'm sure that whoever dreamed up the "mebi" thing thinks they are making things easier but until us older programmers and hardware engineers die, that's not gonna take hold very well. Of course it speaks volumes that the term "mebi" is almost 10 years old now and still hasn't taken hold.
One might also note that memory is the reason we use these terms in the first place since hard drives and the like didn't come about for a long while so trying to make the language even more confusing, and garbled, because hard drive manufacturers want to skimp on drive size seems asinine, and they DO want to skimp on drive since formatting 160Gb, whether it's 160,000,000,000 bytes or 160x1024x1024x1024 bytes, only yields about 140,000,000,000 bytes.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Not necessary anymore. Remove it!
Ahh, but the word "byte" was meaningless until someone determined (a few decades ago) that it would be 8 binary digits. Notice the use of the word "binary", as in "base-2". Thus the closest power in a base-2 system that approximates 1 million (base 10) is 1,048,576, therefore a megabyte (but not a megajoule, megaton, megalomaniac, or mega-maid) is 1,048,576 bytes, due to the implied number base in the use of that word.
Perhaps redefining the use of the word megabyte would've worked if they had instead simply supplemented it by making mebibyte be 1,000,000 bytes. (As in "mebi" you wanted this as a base 10 power instead of the default base 2 power for some reason.)
interesting, there was a thing called svnc which used an svga frame buffer or something. I haven't used it for years and do not know if it is still available/maintained. it was pretty small as well.
In this case it's probably not even correct since flash chips are usually specified in megabits, not megabytes. So the chip in question is 2Mb.
In 2004, Gavin Barraclough wrote an OS (from scratch) in only 3721 bytes:
...
"This is a 32-bit multitasking operating system for x86 computers, with GUI and filesystem, support for loading and executing user applications in elf binary format, with ps2 mouse and keyboard drivers, and vesa graphics. And a command shell. And an application - a simple text-file viewer."
Granted, it may not be the must useful (or maintainable!) OS
http://www.de.ioccc.org/years.html#2004_gavin
"Good news, everyone!"
ogg theora video of the same.
...Comrade Linux runs YOU!
40-Pin IDE Flash memory that fits quite nicely in the ide socket.
2GB for less than $50.00
I do commend the efforts of getting linux in the bios, but what can you really do with 2MB?
The whole world has moved on now that we've all figured out that our hard drives are going to be a tad bit smaller than we thought. Then again, the memory companies have helped to even things out. The last time I bought 1 gigabyte of RAM, I was pleasantly suprised to have received 73,741,824 extra bytes!
... well, and the fact that every single time you try to throw them into a general discussion somebody is going to call you on it. Every time. Every single time. It's patently obvious nerdiness, and somebody will always jump on it, and people like us will jump into the fray.
How about we all just pretend that we know what we're talking about when we say that our internet connection is "8 megs" or that our hard drive is "200 gigs" or that we have a "3 gig" processor. None of these statements are accurate, but we know what they mean and they're close enough for the sake of discussion.
There's nothing wrong with saying "mebibyte" or "gibibyte", aside from the potential for them to sound like a three year old trying to pronounce "megabyte" and "gigabyte."
Well, since I am proud to be a nerd (Actually I use the term "geek" but whatever) I guess I don't have a problem with that. It's like the sweatshirt THE WORLD DOESN'T KNOW I'M A (whatever).
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The day I start saying mebibytes will be a cold day in hell.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
My hard drive can read 30mb/s and has a 16MB of cache. If the image is 2MB, and grub prefetches it into drive cache, can't it also boot this software in 6 sec? Drive spin-up should happen in parallel with POST, so the only time you lose is waiting for the legacy bios to do its thing...
;)
Still, a diskless 2MB Linux + X is damn impressive! After all, "1.44" floppies are really 2MB...
So PLEASE, stop trying to redefine kilo to mean 1024!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I wonder what would happen if they could work with these guys.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
This is a 32-bit multitasking operating system for x86 computers, with GUI and filesystem, support for loading and executing user applications in elf binary format, with ps2 mouse and keyboard drivers, and vesa graphics. And a command shell. And an application - a simple text-file viewer." ...
Granted, it may not be the must useful (or maintainable!) OS
Piece of cake... According to Andrew S. Tanenbaum "you'd have to be real dumb not to be able to write an operating system in a month.".
Sorry, but that dont impress me much. Anyone can do it in a month. Unless you're real dumb, in which case you write an obsoleted monolithic kernel instead. *ducks*
We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
"Oh yeah, DVDs are measured in decimal multiples too. 4.7GB == 4700000000B."
Um, no, a DVD is 4700372992B
Which isn't 4.7GB in decimal OR octal.
Why are HDD in Kb (1024) multiples? Because a sector is 512bytes. So a 120GB HDD isn't 120,000,000 bytes.
YOU were the one who wanted to go all pedantic...
So where's the Basic interpreter?
Not only that, but consider that for many purposes, given this BIOS, you don't *need* any other OS. I think that's the real point here.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Don't you mean 0.9765625 years old?
Buy a book. You can keep it under your pillow.
Stick Men
> so we can stop all this ambiguous bullshit and just use precise, clear terminology.
The hurdle you have yet to clear is to make anyone actually care how accurate and precise you are.
I prefer kibobytes myself, which are exactly 997 bozobytes long.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Did you not learn anything? It's almost 0x0A years old. Sheesh. Everyone's trying to be a comedian.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Apple once embedded System 6.0.3 in the Macintosh Classic ROM. This was in 512K and allowed the user to boot when their boot media was corrupted.
So fitting Linux into 2 meg is hardly surprising. Being flash it can be updated, obviously, highlighting the limited usefulness of the Mac solution.
Unfortunately, the "he must be compensating for something" argument doesn't apply here (in fact, it would apply in the complete opposite situation), otherwise I'd have been all over that.
I suppose I'll have to go with a firm, yet warranted, "you know what they say about guys that write small operating systems..."
I'll be here all night, folks.
You probably meant 10^6 where you typed 10^3...
When you think about it: 2^20 is actually pretty much 10^6 plus a low sales tax anyway, and almost nobody seems to complain that sales tax is not included on the prices listed in the stores either...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
MEBIBIBABYBITS. Sheesh, you morons and your baby talk.
Just say megabytes, or MB and leave your childish notions at home. If you want to run with the big dogs, you have to stop pooping like a puppy. AND STOP LICKING YOURSELF, sheesh, you make a guy sick.
You can write an operating system in an hour if all it does is load from a boot sector and play /usr/games/moo. Its making it attractive to modern computer users that takes a while.
Whenever I update the Freshmeat record, I'm noting the addition of two or three FLASH chips, probably the same number of support chips, and usually one or two motherboards. The web pages are hopelessly out-of-date when it comes to what LinuxBIOS supports. My suggestion is to print out the web page then add everything I've noted in the updates since the page was last changed. My guess would be that you would give LinuxBIOS a great deal more credibility.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Your experience != truth.
I worked for a company that sold a lot of hard drives, starting when you started and going on for a long time. The makers stopped lying at some point and told the truth for a few years, then said 'awww fuck it' and started lying again. Their lying doesn't make it truth.
If you knew what you were talking about, instead of being so convinced of your superiority, you'd shut the hell up. Example.
Did you know, for example, that hard drives have 512 byte blocks? That's as low as it goes.
Another example.
Did you know that computers all say how big file sizes and filesystem sizes in KB, MB, and GB, not some mumbling made up HD industry made up units (that they don't have to astroturf, unless you are paid to do so).
Guess what. You are a not a moron, as someone asserted. You are young and lack wisdom, and will look back on this some day and slap your forehead and say "What was I thinking?!". When that day comes, slap *real* *hard*.
heheh, SybianOS?
:)
If it can run J2ME apps, I'd totally get one for my girlfriend
[BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY]: X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVI
The phone is limited to USB 1.1 in order to save power.
Depends of which one you're using. KDrive (which is what this uses) is purty derned small.
What I want to see is the BIOS config done via a pretty GUI, and the normal process to chainload to another OS.
Or, how about booting a Disk-On-Chip with Linux on it; the HD is used only for data.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
this idea was proposed in 2001 on halfbakery.com, an australian site for half baked ideas.
f bakery.com/idea/OS_20ROM_20for_20the_20desktop#107 7642000
their link seems down now, so here's the wayback machine version:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060305034407/www.hal
Even just playing /usr/games/moo is probably harder than you think. Unless by "operating system" you mean something like DOS where you pretty much rely on the BIOS for disk, video, and input. And even then you still have to implement filesystem support (if only read-only), loading of executables into memory, basic system calls, etc. And if this is a statically linked Linux/BSD binary, you'll probably have to know how to switch into 32 bit mode and setup a VM.. in which case you'll lose a lot of BIOS support. Even a very basic OS is a fair amount work.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
does it run Windows?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Probably an unnecessary question, but are you aware of wapuro? (waado puroosessa == word processor)
I realize just now that I haven't noticed them in the stores in the last several years, but they used to be quite common in Japan. Small word processing dedicated portable with a built-in (usually thermal) printer. Releatively heavy beasts in most cases, however. Hitachi or Toshiba, about ten years ago, was selling a model without the printer, but ultra-lights of course wiped out the market for those.
I think the problem with maintaining the market is the pricing.
Gives new meaning to the term HARD BOOT!
You just want your username not to be outdated!
A "tad" smaller? Are you kidding? With the hard drive capacities today, that "tad" has become huge! For example, take a 750 MB drive. The difference in capacity between what people would expect (i.e., 750*2^30 bytes) and what the drive actually has (i.e., 750*10^9 bytes) is (750*2^30)-(750*10^9) = 55306368000 bytes. Or in other words, 51.5 GB (binary) or 55.3 GB (decimal). So, your "750 GB" drive is really only 700! Still think it's only a "tad?"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You have a stepford wife.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, if you run a GNU/Linux box and look at a lot of command-line utils, the abbreviations they use are certainly the standard. So for instance, the output of ifconfig on my computer currently reports, amongst others: GNU and BSD command-line utils also generally provide both options to output values in non-standard (i.e. 1 KB = 1 024 bytes) and standard sizes (e.g. "ls -h" will give non-standard output, whereas "ls --si" (on GNU at least) will give standard output).
Similarly, I just bought a 4 GB USB flash drive, and it has a formatted capacity of 4 000 000 000 bytes. Debian's apt-get reports my download speed as being 13 kB/s.
So both aspects of the standard are in practical use.
As for what "most people" will do: They'll say whatever their computer says. And at least in metric countries, I suspect most people would be surprised if you told them they're wrong when they approximate 28 324 124 as 28 megabytes.
Look out!
Did you know that computers all say how big file sizes and filesystem sizes in KB, MB, and GB, not some mumbling made up HD industry made up units (that they don't have to astroturf, unless you are paid to do so).
Yeah, right. Windows apps report one or the other virtually at random, with no indication of which it is. Most linux console apps have a separate -h and -H options for one or the other, and [a number greater than zero] of my linux GUI apps report in kiB and MiB. It get's even better when you talk about transfer speed. 1GB file over a 1Gb connection... Takes 8 seconds right? Oh, whats that? Maybe it takes 9 seconds? What does 1 second matter? How about if its 1TB over a 1Gb connection. 135 minutes or 150 minutes?
So indeed, there is a personal reason this issue riles me up.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Man, I don't think you were trying to be funny, but you totally just made me shoot semi-hot coffee out my nose.
Did you just launch into a giant math tantrum -- one so severe that it seemed appropriate to show your work -- to not only demonstrate but really drive home your point that, essentially, 7% is over and above the threshold of "a tad?" (I'll leave my seven percent calculation as an exercise for the reader)
Anyhow, it's all relative. I believe that 50GB is within the realm of a tad when considering a 750GB drive. Plus, we know in advance how much space we'll be getting, so it's really not difficult to select a drive that meets our requirements; it's not like we're selecting a custom size and paying per gigabyte. Besides, the "why is my hard drive not as big as the box said it would be" is one of the first great questions on the road to geekdom and complete social disorder. I look back on answering this great question for my bored and bewildered family members as a sort of rite of passage.