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MeeGo, Zero To VT320 In Seventeen Seconds
muirhead writes "Installing MeeGo on an Eee PC 1000 netbook is quick, slick, and easy. The user interface is colorful and stylish with many quirky animations. MeeGo's features are easy to discover and it is fast and responsive. Underneath it all though there is still just a netbook. That means it's got a display screen that has no significant weight behind it. That means typing on an undersized keyboard that has no life. All of these undesirable features can, however, be fixed by adding 9kg (~20lbs) of VT320 video terminal."
At least they've used the 'Digital' icon right for once. For added value, he needs to install something like simh on the netbook and run a PDP emulator.
so this guy hooked up a terminal to a netbook. mad skillz.
move along people, nothing to see here.
Cool I guess, but why? Also interesting to note that the BIOS took the longest out of that entire boot process.
I rescued a Vax, complete with a VT320 from the garbage at work and while it all worked, I simply couldn't justify the electrical bill and the noise for a machine that had far less computing power than a Mac mini. So it finally met its end at the loading dock of an electronics recycling center.
Thinking about the VT320 makes me feel old; I'm sitting in the computer room at the university, with its linoleum floor, coding away on a VT320 logged into an Ultrix machine, with my custom termcap that mapped the function keys to screen sessions, I felt like I was CODING. REAL. SOFTWARE. This was the BIG TIME. Nevermind that even vi slowed to a crawl when someone invoked the compiler. I wouldn't be surprised if the Meego was a slightly better machine than the Ultrix, performance-wise.
Now get off my...aw, forget it.
That's not hooking a classic terminal to a netbook. This is hooking a classic terminal to a netbook. (More pictures.)
He probably should change his login password now.
I was all excited to see DEC back in the news. Oh how I missed you since that fateful day in 1998 when you got bought by Compaq, which inturn got bought by HP by the woman who now hopes to do for California and America, what she did for HP.
But alas, no. You are gone and shall never return. I guess I'll just have to file your section next to Enlightenment's, and all the other sections that people have no idea what they're for. Can't someone over clock a a DEC Alpha or something?
I'm really tempted to post some enlightenment news, but I wish it was something more than their most recent point release.
What a blockhead.
I'll be impressed when I see a VT330 or VT340 showing a graphical web browser -- heck, you could go back as far as a VT125 to get monochrome graphics...Not that sending bitmaps over serial would be fun, but modern vector graphics might be..altered..to something ReGIS compatible. That'd be a cool hack.
Neat to see a VT320 going again though, anyway -- been ages since I've seen one fired up.
What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
The pleasant surprise for me is that it was so simple to set up a thirty year old video terminal on a modern light weight host system. MeeGo has not forgotten its Unix heritage.
Um, doesn't -every- Linux distro include this? I don't know of a single Linux distro with the exception of perhaps DSL and some embedded distros that wouldn't include basic command line tools. What do you expect with a Linux distro? That because your running Ubuntu all it does is boot a version of Windows XP in emulation via the Linux kernel?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I remember borrowing an old Wyse terminal from work and hooking it up to my Apple IIGS running GNO/ME (GNO Multitasking Environment. Check here: http://www.hypermall.com/companies/procyon/gnome.html).
It's kind of cool that all this still works in current-day Linux. There's not many dumb terminals around any more for sure unless you're using an IBM Mainframe I guess. I suspect they still use 3270's.
I used to connect my HP 48 calculator to my linux machine via a serial port and used a terminal emulator on the 48 to log into the linux box and kill processes and stuff. Way more cool. And still portable!
So did you type
-9
[ENTER]
process-name
[ENTER]
killall
[ENTER]
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
What most people don't realize is the machines most of us use every day are far more powerful than the Crays of the 80's. I think tomorrow I'll see if I can get the Lear-Seigler dumb terminal hooked up to on of my Linux machines. You will need a teletype to beat that!
This is coming from someone who used to have a dozen (or so) VT100 and VT220 terminals from various manufacturers running in his garage for a couple of years... why bother?
this is a story how?
Yeah baby!
getty ain't going to be losing serial support anytime soon.
But yes, serial console is awesome. Although not awesome enough to write an article about.
People really need to learn that "D" subminiature connectors are not inherently serial or parallel. A DB-25 with RS-232 on it is still RS-232. Nothing parallel about it, apart from the fact that a lot of printer cards used the same connector.
Sent from my PDP-11
A VT-100 should be plenty for anyone.
Guy calls a 25pin serial port "parallel" and is impressing us with is mad skillz using lego to "convert" it to 9 pin. The need for null-modem probably took him weeks to figure out.
I think this kid should get off of my lawn.
I remember doing something similar with a vt220 and dos back in the day. Now, what was the command to redirect console to the serial port? Something to do with con and pipes?
copy con || com2:
or something
also some baud rate and Xon stuff.
Anyway, the point being that my terminal had an amber phosphor and thus was far cooler than this guy's.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
His instructions are weird. You don't need ncurses to get a serial terminal working. serial port supporting getty (like agetty) is enough. and to activate changes in inittab you don't need to reboot your computer (it's not windows, you know..) just run "telinit q".
I can't claim to be a PDP-11 hero, I did a bit of programming and hardware faulting on them in the late 1980s in line with my jobs in telecoms and call centres, but the scary thing for me is realising the orders of magnitude of increased processing power that exists in a modern netbook than was in the DEC kit.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Thank you for giving us your password! (It requires slow motion and a bit of guessing to figure it out.)
Add the following to /etc/inittab
# Serial tty in case console stuffs up
s1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L -w 9600 ttyS0 vt100
then
telinit q
and you're done. Now you too can have a vt100 plugged into your ttyS0 serial port (or an emulator via a null modem cable running at 9600bps, no parity, 8 bits, 1 stop bit, no flow control)
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
The sad guy mistook a db25 rs232 for a parallel port... sigh
I've been doing this for years, since 1997... so this must be one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Here is my 4 step recipe for Ubuntu, using USB serial adapters:
1) hook up the stuff and config the terminals correctly (I used 9600 8n1 due to long cables, got weird chars at 19200+) /etc/init/ttyUSB0.conf
2) Install Ubuntu on your system
3) put the following in
# ttyUSB0 - getty
#
# This service maintains a getty on tty1 from the point the system is
# started until it is shut down again.
#start on stopped rc RUNLEVEL=[2345]
#stop on runlevel [!2345]
respawn /sbin/getty -8 9600 ttyUSB0 vt100 ...
exec
---(repeat for as many terminals you have, incrementing the 0 of ttyUSB0 to 1 to 2 etc)---
4a) reboot
or
4b) sudo service ttyUSB0 start
(repeat for as many terminals you have, incrementing 0 to 1 to 2 etc)
*) profit
Here is my setup with a WYSE vt420 compatible and two vt320's
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickdeckardt/4748415699/
Gee wiz, that was easy... So why is this on the frontpage of slashdot?
Could you clarify you point by using a FUEL/Car analogy?
Indeed, a VAX had 1Mb of memory and about 1Mip of processing power, compared to todays top of the range processors (160,000 MIPS for a Core i7).
My office desktop machine (the one I'm typing on now) has 16GB of RAM, i.e. 16000 times more ram, Quad Xeon processors, that's half a million times more processing power.
My MOBILE PHONE, has 512 x the RAM and about 30,000 times the MIPS even.
Yet some how I'm typing in text at 12 words a minute, not dissimilar to typing on JANET via a terminal.
I like the whole idea of putting linux on the netbook I think it helps keep cost down. Plus some Linux distro's like Ubuntu have a netbook version that are very light weight and easy to use. The distro he is using is command line driven does not get more light weight then that.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
Nah, you should program using cards (9-edge down of course) or UNIX's first character terminal (the teletype 37) to get a true retro feeling. Programming in cards where you submitted the deck to the attendents for processing, and sometime later picked your output, tended to make you check the program by hand before submitting, particularly if you didn't get the output back until the next day. I remember in my first high school having the 029 or 027 card punch in the next room to the computer, made it so convenient for doing those last minute changes (though in a pinch, tape and a portable hole punch would do), while my second high school had the 24-hour turn around.
This whole discussion has overtones of byte8406. But this does get me thinking, if tech employees are considered old at 40, how much more common will the "I never saw a 25 pin rs232 port" type of mistake be in the future?
A long time ago I had a handmedown 386 I used to run Debian 1.3 on. At the time I was pretty poor and I didn't have a VGA display, so I used to borrow one from a friend when I needed one like for install or when I trashed it. The rest of the time I used a c64 running Novaterm with a mono display for clarity, worked great.
The 386 is long gone but the c64 still comes in handy.
POKE 36879,8
I don't think the other distros in Meego's space (Android and ChromeOS) include ncurses or VTs. I could be very wrong, though.
That's when you've got something impressive. Text-mode output to a terminal isn't really that interesting.
Best config of them all, MicroVAX 4000, VMS 5.5-2, DecNET Phase IV. Back in the 90s I used to set up a boxen for customers. When checking back years later, it wasn't unusual to find them still up and running from the point of initial setup.
My weirdest client of them all still runs a Micro PDP-11 based comms system 24/7/365 with no downtime.
Just so you kids know.
Now get it up on a Telex 33-ASR and I'll be really impressed.
So it finally met its end at the loading dock of an electronics recycling center.
The proper way for an old VAX to meet its end is out in a field, at the receiving end of a couple dozen 12 gauge slugs fired at it.
Son, I am disappoint.
In terms of MIPS (meaningless indicator of processor speed), the Vax 780 was the gold standard for benchmarks. As such, it became the measurement all of the super-minis measured themselves against, and the general concensus was it a 1MIP machine. Of course later VAXes came in at different speed/price points.
first post!
So?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I remember sitting in our college computer lab watching one of my fellow students (who was a bit more advanced than me) start up the first version of Linux that would boot off of floppies... boot and root disk, no installer, no hard disk device driver either. It had a serial terminal emulation and some basic network capabilities, so we connected a telnet session from it to a 300 bps decwriter terminal nearby and chatted back and forth for a bit. For those not familiar with the Decwriter, it was a slowish bidirectional dot matrix printer connected to a tty keyboard... one of those terminals for which the early line based editors were state of the art, because they could print a line at a time.
This article is pretty much pointless... I suppose all it does is underscore how skills that used to be mainstream (every computer person knew how to connect a terminal, or they didn't connect) are now "special"... I wonder if the guy who did this is one of the kids whose parents always told him he was a winner and gave him a trophy even if he lost?
If you want to really impress me, find a way to create/modify a netbook so it has a real, usable keyboard that others can build. Improve the product, don't just connect old hard to find hardware to it for the sake of nostalgia.
What I'm wondering is why you're so against it. Does it stop your BSD working? Does it stop Debian running? What's the problem? Why do you care?
THAT is the attitude that generally sucks. And I kinda have to wonder...
Those were the days when we discovered that our military grade Eprom programmer was actually an embedded PDP-8 and you could run code on it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I did the same thing 5 years ago. I wanted a persistent IRC terminal next to my workstation because I was way to cool to just have an XChat window open all the time.
I put it together out of a Wyse 160 terminal that I pulled out of a dumpster (the box had never been opened so it was effectively brand-new) and a Pentium 90 netbook-like computer that someone gave me.