in an attempt to make a homebrew solid state solution a month ago, i purchased 2gb of pc133 and threw it in my desktop.. only to discover that a limitation in the linux ramdisk code (malloc issues i believe) limits the size of ramdisks to 512m, and even at that size i experienced some incredibly flakey behavior.. not to mention the fact that enabling large memory support in my kernel broke the nvidia glx drivers and a whole bunch of other stuff that was very obviously never tested on a machine with crazy amounts of ram.
using a combination of a huge initrd image that never unloads, and a journaling filesystem like reiser it would be incredibly simple to build a machine running entirely from solidstate media using a network/platter-based volume to re-populate the ram on boot in the event of a power loss to the last mirrored state of the FS..
For those of us who think of X as being just a way to manage piles of terminals, there are some pretty nice command line alternatives to the usual gui bloatware, like caim, a fairly nice IRC-like cli AOL messanger clone which i've been using for quite awhile. While it still needs some development work to make handling multiple conversations more bearable, it's a good alternative to the gui apps (and the ability to get on AIM from anywhere in the world using a telnet client comes in quite handy for those of us who live online and hate waiting for buggy java applets to download)
It's encouraging to see that CLI apps are still being developed by small groups of rebels. I've always found the command line to be infinitely more efficient; once the learning curve of familiarizing one's self with commands has past, feeding a quick string of keys to an app will always be more efficient then the current mouse-centric gui environments (though I look forward to the days of eye tracking and other, more natural command interfaces)
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in an attempt to make a homebrew solid state solution a month ago, i purchased 2gb of pc133 and threw it in my desktop.. only to discover that a limitation in the linux ramdisk code (malloc issues i believe) limits the size of ramdisks to 512m, and even at that size i experienced some incredibly flakey behavior.. not to mention the fact that enabling large memory support in my kernel broke the nvidia glx drivers and a whole bunch of other stuff that was very obviously never tested on a machine with crazy amounts of ram.
using a combination of a huge initrd image that never unloads, and a journaling filesystem like reiser it would be incredibly simple to build a machine running entirely from solidstate media using a network/platter-based volume to re-populate the ram on boot in the event of a power loss to the last mirrored state of the FS..
but the code is lacking! *nudge nudge*
-hmodes
It's encouraging to see that CLI apps are still being developed by small groups of rebels. I've always found the command line to be infinitely more efficient; once the learning curve of familiarizing one's self with commands has past, feeding a quick string of keys to an app will always be more efficient then the current mouse-centric gui environments (though I look forward to the days of eye tracking and other, more natural command interfaces)