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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.
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.
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
>Core tools are easily replaced.
Then go for it, or start calling GNU/Linux by its proper name.
No. One. Cares. Core tools are easily replaced. An operating system is not.
At the risk of feeding the trolls...
Yes, core tools are easily replaced, but usually they are NOT replaced - and when they are replaced, they are usually replaced with GNU tools, rather than vice versa. Writing a kernel is hard, but it would have been nigh on impossible without the GNU toolchain. And it WAS Stallman's GNU Public License that Linus chose as the license covering his then experimental OS kernel. So yes, RMS probably does deserve a little more credit than he gets for Linux. But then, so do hundreds, nay thousands, of other individuals who contributed.
But do not expect me to call it "Guh-Noo slash Linux" and keep a straight face!
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
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!
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.
What you're referring to as Linux,
Actually no, what I'm referring to is distro's as is quite clearly stated in my post in an attempt to forestall kneejerk Stallman pedantry. Obviously I failed.
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".
You're forgetting one simple GNU/Fact - rms is GNU/God. He created the GNU/Heavens and the GNU/Earth!
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.
Actually the proper name for what I use is:
Mandriva GNU/Linux/xorg/KDE/Qt/Gtk
GNU/Linux is not its proper name, any more that Windows with Cygwin installed is called GNU/Windows. The OS is Linux, it always has been, the only person who wanted it called GNU/Linux is Stallman. In fact, there's probably more of X.org seen by the average end user than anything in the GNU toolchain, so maybe it should be called XOrg/Linux.
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?
Is he also responsible for GNU/Metal?!
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Could you clarify you point by using a FUEL/Car analogy?
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.
I don't think it needs to be called GNU/Linux either but Linux is not an operating system. Just saying Linux is perfectly reasonable short hand most of the time because those talkin about it either can make the distinction you are speaking about the operating system or platform from context or don't know enough about the subject to understand there is a difference between the kernel and an operating system.
Operating systems manage resources and provide some method for the user to interact with the computer with a focus on loading and running other processes, and moving data; but not processing data. The kernel only manages resources.
The name Windows for instance is alot more like calling GNU/Linux GNU than it is calling it Linux. If you apply the same reasoning that you call GNU/Linux to Windows you would call it Executive, or maybe NTKernel.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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?
I like to call GNU/Linux by its proper name as well: Linux.
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.
Actually no, what I'm referring to is distro's as is quite clearly stated in my post in an attempt to forestall kneejerk Stallman pedantry. Obviously I failed.
Speaking of pedantry, "distro" is not a contaction. If it were a contraction, it would be distri' and not distro. And if it were a contraction, there would be an apostrophe whether it was singular or plural.
</pedant>
Free Martian Whores!
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.
To the vast majority of people, Linux is the OS, Linux Kernel is the Kernel, and most people are happy that there are many flavours to the OS, called distributions. The Stallman/Debian idea that "Debian GNU/Linux" is the OS and Linux is the kernel is a minority view.
Off-topic, yes, but I just hope nobody wants to start calling out the BSD's for this p*ssing contest. I'd hate to see "GNU/FreeBSD" being thrown out there.
EEEK!
I like some of Stallman's work, but his attitude generally sucks! You kinda have to wonder...
Holy happy hippy crap!
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.
If they were VT100's and VT220's, then they came from one manufacturer, DEC. There were knockoff's, of course, but they were usually given a slightly different part number. They were rarely exactly the same as a VT in terms of how they handled edge cases of escape sequences, which was a major source of problems when using their quirky varients.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I think everytime we refer to Linux, we should really be calling it GNU/Linux/XOrg/KDE (or GNU/Linux/XOrg/Gnome if you prefer). I mean it's not a terribly useful desktop OS to the great unwashed without KDE or Gnome (or XFCE or Fluxbox or whatever).
And anybody who calls it "GNU/Linux" without the XOrg and desktop environment hates freedom!
One million instructions per what? The suspense is killing me!
Don't forget GNU/Coke!
Is 1563649 a prime number?
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.