Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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.
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.
No, that would only happen if you got it to install on your bed.
So far, I've only gotten NetBSD to do that... Right after I installed it on my toaster, and before I installed it on my electric can opener.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Explains a lot really :)
Two gigs? What do you need? Pre-downloaded pr0n?
I am not a crackpot.
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 ]
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Or if you installed it in one of those... ah... programmable marital aids... that might get used in a bed. Bedded, if you will.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
...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++;
Explains a lot really
Micro-soft ?
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.
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
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.
You could be the idiot working on this project. You want additional hardware support? Join up and help produce it. People aren't idiots simply because they're not providing what you want. Alternatively you could also hire a developer for the period of time it takes to support your chosen hardware...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.'"
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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
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.