I keep hearing little tidbits about Tux2 (Tux2: The Filesystem That Would Be King). I can't find Daniel Phillips's website anymore nor have I seen any more information about it in the last few months. What I have read and heard about it sounded very interesting (I would say it's sounds promising but I don't know enough about file systems to know how good an idea it is realistically).
Would this be under "currently abandonded" or "abducted by aliens"?
I gotta wonder how Linus and most of the kernel development group feels about this. While Linux probably isn't guiding missles yet (and I honestly doubt it ever will be) it is being deployed (buzzword alert) in what could be considered a life or death situation (in the end). Not only does this give Linux some impressive standing-groud, it says something about Linux, open source and (while Allchin may not agree) the "American Way". I hope to hear more stories similar to this one in the near and distant future.
Cheers and congratulations to the kernel development team and Linux in general. Keep up the amazing work!
The case looks like it could still hold a small (laptop size) hard drive. Find a dead laptop and rip it out. I don't know what kind of interface laptop hard drives usually use but I'm guessing its some kind of IDE interface with power on the cable. It would add a slight bit of heat, some noise and as for the reliability, well, you probably want to backup the flash card anyways. Also, throwing a small fan on the side of the case and some small vent holes on the other (stratically placed) might just help overall. A powersupply, CPU and that display (I have one, it gets a little hot on the back) do generate some heat, cant hurt.
Also, I know that someone (3com or intel I think) makes a PCI based ethernet card that is teeny-tiny. Even then, PCMCIA network cards are quite small and getting really cheap and linux supports them quite nicely (3com's at least).
It might also be interesting to have the base-machine boot off a network via NFS for all its main stuff and then read the content for whatever its serving off a hard disk, making more space for the content on the disk.
I realize that this was just a little for-fun project for them and I'm just brainstorming about the possibility of my own version! Anyone in the Cincinnati area wanna get together and make one?:)
What distribution are you using? I'm getting TONS of errors when I try to compile this thing.. First problem was to fix the "shopts" line in Makefile to "set -o noglob" then I had to make some changes to gen_makefile.sh and comment a sed line out of Makefile, etc..
Now I'm stuck on "Runtime error (func=(main), adr=23): Divide by zero"
If you would like to take this discussion to email, remove "nispam." from my email address..
Stroke/letter recognition is a pain. I had a Newton 2000 for a few years and got used for taking notes just like I would on paper, in cursive. No, I didn't have to remember some new character shape. No, I didnt have to write one character at a time. No I didn't have to wait. No, I didn't have to write each character over the previous one. No, it didn't mis-recognize every 10th character. No, I didn't have to write letters in one area and numbers in the other. No, I didn't have to go into capitalization mode. Most people don't understand what this means. It means you write like you would on paper and in a few days, after the newton had learned your handwriting through a little AI, it would work almost flawlessly.
Ok, I think I was obnoxious enough about that, now, let me continue onto the other benefits of the newton (2x00 especially).
Real PCMCIA slots (two on 2x00). You could go down to your local computer store, pick up almost any modem, put it in your newton and be relatively sure it would work. Not some special "springboard" module that has to be bought at some special store or online.
It's FAST. I believe people had talked of writing an mp3 player for newton.
A real speaker and a port of macintalk at the end. It was easy to have a message or email read to me and I would easily understand it.
Real voice recording. A microphone provided voice or music recodings in different qualities and would record until the unit was out of space. When that happened, just put a PCMCIA flash card in.
The list goes on and on and.. You get the picture.
From the fourth link: 2. LONG LIFE: The light emitting portion of an L.E.D. has a 100,000 hour life span. A standard incandescent bulb will typically burn out in less than 40 hours.
Really? I can't think of any light bulb I've ever had that lasted less than a few weeks (and yes, I realize that means hours of on-time). Someone is buying really bad light bulbs!
Cool, thanks for the nice post to clear some of that stuff up.
As for the window decoration themes, how are themes added? For widget themes I imagine a file is placed somewhere that the Themes->Style item in the Control Center will see and allow changes. But, what about the window decoration? Are they different themes all together that have to be configured some other place or do they become part of the widget themes?
I'm just confused as to how adding themes works and how the window decorations and widget decorations are differentiated...
My main gripe with KDE is its themes, or lack of. I have been checking kde.themes.org twice a week or so and havent seen a new theme or new news in months! I don't know if it's because the administrator the site has disappeared or just because no one does KDE themes anymore. I would write a few themes myself if I had any artistic skills.
If I understand correctly, KDE has some impressive themeing abilities. The GUI widgets as well as the window borders and such can be themed!
The second major gripe is window management. How do I tell KDE's window manager that I want a non-KDE app/window (like XMMS) to always be on top?
Actually, you dont need a monitor and keyboard directly attached to the unit itself. Throw a dumb terminal (or minicom on your PC) onto serial port A and set the term settings to 9600 N81 (dont forget the null modem in the line) and turn the sparc on. Wait a few mins and you should start to see output. If you don't, mess arround with the term settings and such.
I know of no PS2 to sun convertor for the keyboard. As for the monitor, there is a convertor I believe but either I don't remember ever having one or if I did have one, I've never got it to work. You do need an ethernet transciever, check your local PC stores (call first).
Email me if you need more help with that unit. Also check the Sun Hardware FAQ that I referenced in my main post..
I currently own a Sparc IPX with the Weitek Powerup chip. I bought the machine from a guy at a computer show that thought it was a PC but couldnt find a way to hook a monitor up to it and get it to boot. $25 for the unit including the upgrade and a 200 meg hard drive with the previous owners install of Solaris.
I've owned or used quite a bit of Sun hardware in the past (the only sun hardware I own now is the IPX).
The 4/110 I owned was the server for my domain for about 6 months or so. Running NetBSD with a really fast SCSI drive it served its purpose and did amazingly well considering its age. The box virges on being "Cute" but is just a little too bulky.
The 4/260 was a fun beast. It took two people to lift it out of the trunk of my car at the time. They put casters on the unit for a very good reason. I believe this beast had a least 12 huge fans, 6 above and 6 below the card cage. When you turned this thing on, the lights dimmed and you would think a 747 had just landed in the room. The other cool thing was the power supply that came down on a tray making it easy to work on (although the power supply is the size of a mini-tower PC case.:)
All of these machines have been quite nice hardware wise. Everything feels much more solid and stong than current PC hardware I'm used to. I haven't had the chance to get my hands on newer Sun hardware (I would imagine that the system admin's at work would get scared if I started touching one of the newer boxes) and I hope that sun has continued the legacy of building good hardware. Sun hardware aside, I wish PC hardware had some of the features of my IPX. NVRAM is nice, you can tweak machine settings, run diagnostics and other cool things that just arent available on a PC BIOS.
If you've only used PC hardware and are willing to spend a hundred dollars are so, go pick up an old IPX-era sun box and play with it. I think you'll be impressed and even though some of them are over 15 years old, they can still make worthy machines. Check out the Sun Hardware Faq (first hit on google) for more information and some nostagia.
Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to Happy Buckyball.
Caution: Happy Buckyball may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
Happy Buckyball Contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
Do not use Happy Buckyball on concrete.
Geoff (credit to Saturday Night Live for Happy Fun Ball)
Sometimes its hard, really, to read articles that hemos writes. I go very slow when reading I have to think carefully about where a comma or period should have been that he left out somewhere again. I like the articles I do but sometimes I want just to have babelfish translate article to German and back in hopes that make more sense it does.
This is just a joke, I'm just joking, that is true.:)
I dont see how this message can be moderated as flamebait:
* There are no obscenities.
* No one is ripping on anyone, in fact, just the opposite, they're correcting or responding to a comment that contained a question. This person answered that question with a good analogy.
* There is no c00l 7alk.
Moderators, please think _objectively_ for a minute about what your moderating and look at the message from a few different point of views.
Slashdot Mirror
Would this be under "currently abandonded" or "abducted by aliens"?
GeoffEG
Just use 11-Pound Model Plane Vs. The Atlantic as the carrier and you have a new method for cross-continent communications!
Ok, so the ping times are gonna suck and having to wait months for a new packet to be constructed if the previous failed also isn't too good.
"How come I didn't get that email from Bob?"
"Oh, the model plane lost a wing half way across the ocean, sorry."
Geoff
I gotta wonder how Linus and most of the kernel development group feels about this. While Linux probably isn't guiding missles yet (and I honestly doubt it ever will be) it is being deployed (buzzword alert) in what could be considered a life or death situation (in the end). Not only does this give Linux some impressive standing-groud, it says something about Linux, open source and (while Allchin may not agree) the "American Way". I hope to hear more stories similar to this one in the near and distant future.
Cheers and congratulations to the kernel development team and Linux in general. Keep up the amazing work!
Geoff
Hey,
Remember me? Still around. Email your address to me if your interested in talkin' 'bout stuff in the cinci area.
Now I get to see if you actually read replies to your posts..
Geoff
The case looks like it could still hold a small (laptop size) hard drive. Find a dead laptop and rip it out. I don't know what kind of interface laptop hard drives usually use but I'm guessing its some kind of IDE interface with power on the cable. It would add a slight bit of heat, some noise and as for the reliability, well, you probably want to backup the flash card anyways. Also, throwing a small fan on the side of the case and some small vent holes on the other (stratically placed) might just help overall. A powersupply, CPU and that display (I have one, it gets a little hot on the back) do generate some heat, cant hurt.
:)
Also, I know that someone (3com or intel I think) makes a PCI based ethernet card that is teeny-tiny. Even then, PCMCIA network cards are quite small and getting really cheap and linux supports them quite nicely (3com's at least).
It might also be interesting to have the base-machine boot off a network via NFS for all its main stuff and then read the content for whatever its serving off a hard disk, making more space for the content on the disk.
I realize that this was just a little for-fun project for them and I'm just brainstorming about the possibility of my own version! Anyone in the Cincinnati area wanna get together and make one?
Geoff
But that still doesn't say why you should use XML over just plaintext:
KEY1="value1"
KEY2="value2"
works fine for me. Why XML?
Geoff
What distribution are you using? I'm getting TONS of errors when I try to compile this thing.. First problem was to fix the "shopts" line in Makefile to "set -o noglob" then I had to make some changes to gen_makefile.sh and comment a sed line out of Makefile, etc..
Now I'm stuck on "Runtime error (func=(main), adr=23): Divide by zero"
If you would like to take this discussion to email, remove "nispam." from my email address..
Geoff
Ok, ill try again:
Stroke/letter recognition is a pain. I had a Newton 2000 for a few years and got used for taking notes just like I would on paper, in cursive. No, I didn't have to remember some new character shape. No, I didnt have to write one character at a time. No I didn't have to wait. No, I didn't have to write each character over the previous one. No, it didn't mis-recognize every 10th character. No, I didn't have to write letters in one area and numbers in the other. No, I didn't have to go into capitalization mode. Most people don't understand what this means. It means you write like you would on paper and in a few days, after the newton had learned your handwriting through a little AI, it would work almost flawlessly.
Ok, I think I was obnoxious enough about that, now, let me continue onto the other benefits of the newton (2x00 especially).
Real PCMCIA slots (two on 2x00). You could go down to your local computer store, pick up almost any modem, put it in your newton and be relatively sure it would work. Not some special "springboard" module that has to be bought at some special store or online.
It's FAST. I believe people had talked of writing an mp3 player for newton.
A real speaker and a port of macintalk at the end. It was easy to have a message or email read to me and I would easily understand it.
Real voice recording. A microphone provided voice or music recodings in different qualities and would record until the unit was out of space. When that happened, just put a PCMCIA flash card in.
The list goes on and on and.. You get the picture.
Ok, I'll get off my soapbox.
2. LONG LIFE: The light emitting portion of an L.E.D. has a 100,000 hour life span. A standard incandescent bulb will typically burn out in less than 40 hours.
Really? I can't think of any light bulb I've ever had that lasted less than a few weeks (and yes, I realize that means hours of on-time). Someone is buying really bad light bulbs!
Geoff
Cool, thanks for the nice post to clear some of that stuff up.
As for the window decoration themes, how are themes added? For widget themes I imagine a file is placed somewhere that the Themes->Style item in the Control Center will see and allow changes. But, what about the window decoration? Are they different themes all together that have to be configured some other place or do they become part of the widget themes?
I'm just confused as to how adding themes works and how the window decorations and widget decorations are differentiated...
Thanks again,
Geoffeg
My main gripe with KDE is its themes, or lack of. I have been checking kde.themes.org twice a week or so and havent seen a new theme or new news in months! I don't know if it's because the administrator the site has disappeared or just because no one does KDE themes anymore. I would write a few themes myself if I had any artistic skills.
If I understand correctly, KDE has some impressive themeing abilities. The GUI widgets as well as the window borders and such can be themed!
The second major gripe is window management. How do I tell KDE's window manager that I want a non-KDE app/window (like XMMS) to always be on top?
This isn't a flame but a concern and questions..
Geoff
Actually, you dont need a monitor and keyboard directly attached to the unit itself. Throw a dumb terminal (or minicom on your PC) onto serial port A and set the term settings to 9600 N81 (dont forget the null modem in the line) and turn the sparc on. Wait a few mins and you should start to see output. If you don't, mess arround with the term settings and such.
I know of no PS2 to sun convertor for the keyboard. As for the monitor, there is a convertor I believe but either I don't remember ever having one or if I did have one, I've never got it to work. You do need an ethernet transciever, check your local PC stores (call first).
Email me if you need more help with that unit. Also check the Sun Hardware FAQ that I referenced in my main post..
Geoff
Boot from the network and install that way.
Much easier...
Geoffeg
This is in reference to the Vintage Unix link..
:)
I currently own a Sparc IPX with the Weitek Powerup chip. I bought the machine from a guy at a computer show that thought it was a PC but couldnt find a way to hook a monitor up to it and get it to boot. $25 for the unit including the upgrade and a 200 meg hard drive with the previous owners install of Solaris.
I've owned or used quite a bit of Sun hardware in the past (the only sun hardware I own now is the IPX).
The 4/110 I owned was the server for my domain for about 6 months or so. Running NetBSD with a really fast SCSI drive it served its purpose and did amazingly well considering its age. The box virges on being "Cute" but is just a little too bulky.
The 4/260 was a fun beast. It took two people to lift it out of the trunk of my car at the time. They put casters on the unit for a very good reason. I believe this beast had a least 12 huge fans, 6 above and 6 below the card cage. When you turned this thing on, the lights dimmed and you would think a 747 had just landed in the room. The other cool thing was the power supply that came down on a tray making it easy to work on (although the power supply is the size of a mini-tower PC case.
All of these machines have been quite nice hardware wise. Everything feels much more solid and stong than current PC hardware I'm used to. I haven't had the chance to get my hands on newer Sun hardware (I would imagine that the system admin's at work would get scared if I started touching one of the newer boxes) and I hope that sun has continued the legacy of building good hardware. Sun hardware aside, I wish PC hardware had some of the features of my IPX. NVRAM is nice, you can tweak machine settings, run diagnostics and other cool things that just arent available on a PC BIOS.
If you've only used PC hardware and are willing to spend a hundred dollars are so, go pick up an old IPX-era sun box and play with it. I think you'll be impressed and even though some of them are over 15 years old, they can still make worthy machines. Check out the Sun Hardware Faq (first hit on google) for more information and some nostagia.
End of rant,
Geoffeg
I know the saying "Kids having kids" but an 8 month old mother is just wrong!
Geoff
So when does Digital:Convergence sue because now people can't use the Cuecat to scan the barcodes in!
Geoff
i got more ryhmes than the bible's got psalms
I quoted it by going to www.happyfunball.com I only remembered the reference.
Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to Happy Buckyball.
Caution: Happy Buckyball may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
Happy Buckyball Contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
Do not use Happy Buckyball on concrete.
Geoff (credit to Saturday Night Live for Happy Fun Ball)
What's going to happen when you want to put someone else on the phone?
Do you stick your finger in their ear? That will look quite silly. Won't "giving people the finger" become a socially accepted way of saying hi?
Geoff
Sometimes its hard, really, to read articles that hemos writes. I go very slow when reading I have to think carefully about where a comma or period should have been that he left out somewhere again. I like the articles I do but sometimes I want just to have babelfish translate article to German and back in hopes that make more sense it does.
:)
This is just a joke, I'm just joking, that is true.
Geoff
>Microsoft has dropped legal threats against them and apologized.
Wow!
Microsoft, I appologize for telling everyone I know that your software is crap.
Windoze sucks!
Ooops, sorry, did it again.
Geoff
Wow, you're still alive...
:)
Fancy meeting you here.
Geoff
The funny part (ok, this whole thing is funny) about this article is that its the best article that I've seen all day...
IMHO,
Geoff
Flamebait?
I dont see how this message can be moderated as flamebait:
* There are no obscenities.
* No one is ripping on anyone, in fact, just the opposite, they're correcting or responding to a comment that contained a question. This person answered that question with a good analogy.
* There is no c00l 7alk.
Moderators, please think _objectively_ for a minute about what your moderating and look at the message from a few different point of views.
My $0.02...
Geoff