> There are working kernels (with shell and networking!)
Lots of stuff works on the devices. tclsh was an easy port, but awfully large to just have around without a good reason. I ran the LambdaMOO server using JHCore. Robert Coie actually built a self-hosting gcc.
Of course, without any CF access yet, anything that won't fit on the 4M ramdisk is run over the 115kbps SLIP/PPP link on NFS...not the speediest disk you've ever used.
> and they are working on getting the GUI running (it seems to be already running on at least one of the developers' machines).
The demo works on my E-15 too. It's pretty much stock microwindows, with new touchpanel calibration code.
The interesting thing about MOO (if you mean the servers related to LambdaMOO) is that multiple users with varying levels of trustedness can extend the system.
There should be some rant here about how MOO servers leverage many of the qualities of Open Source software, but I'm too tired to spew the right buzzwords.
When the Itsy first got announced there was nothing like it available for sale. There still isn't anything that completely matches up, but we're getting closer. LinuxCE is a project to port Linux to CE PDA hardware. No kernels yet, but the boot loaders are coming along. People who can read Japanese should check out the NetBSD/hpcmips project which is apparently at least booting the kernel. Warner Losh has an excellent page of links about the MIPS-based PDAs from a OS-hacker's perspective. It looks like most commodity machines are pretty much contained in two chips each: one CPU+glue, and one "companion" chip. Good documentation from the chip vendors is available.
The closest shipping match to the Itsy are the Casio E-15 and E-100; with 69MHz/131MHz CPUs and 16M of RAM, they're somewhat larger machines than the 8M 486SX/25 I bought to run Linux 0.12, and you can get larger CompactFlash cards (IDE interface internally) than the 60M SCSI disk that was home for a few years. Both Casios are a bit bigger than the Palm III, although I suppose you could get an Everex Freestyle if you wanted the exact size.
If Digital---uh, I mean Compaq---had seeded the right places with proto hardware, I think the excitement about this project would be more justified. I'm glad they're finally releasing their port (dunno where, but this slide has it as a bullet); if nothing else, it will make work on other Linux PDA environments easier. But the commercial marketplace is serving up almost everything the Itsy hardware has except the prototyping ability today. That's where to funnel all that nervous energy you get when you think about how cool it would be to have a Linux PDA.
I've seen several organizations with deep Unix backgrounds choose Red Hat as their Linux distro, sometimes over protests of user base. I'm usually a Debian advocate, but I'm not religious. There can be real business reasons to choose other distros.
The reasons cited fall into two categories. The first look like:
"Red Hat is easier to install."--often true, but it's a toss-up once you start getting into large collections of machines, where you'll be spending a lot of effort anyway in tailoring and cfengine config. But I kinda buy it.
Minor technical arguments. You've heard them all before. Some of them are compelling for some groups.
But what worried me were some of the other reasons given for choosing Red Hat:
"Red Hat is the most popular so we should use it."--Explicit appeals to network effects this early in a life cycle give me the creeps.
"Red Hat is getting all the good hype. It will be easier to explain to management."--Note that this is not the same as "we want to buy something".
"Get over it. Red Hat won."
Those last few reasons are arguments for Red Hat regardless of technical or economic superiority.
Now, what may have happened here was that, in some organizations' cases, the people in charge of making the decision were already RH partisans. The justifications were easy-to-articulate surface statements, and their hard-to-articulate judgements that led them to that position didn't come out.
In some way, I'm glad that there are several distros out there that are close enough technically that this level of discussion is enough. But that won't always be the case if the sentiment in those last few statements overtakes enough of us.
Well, it obviously won't, at least not entirely. There will still be people out there who wipe their new Dell's RH installation to install SuSE, even if that blows away their phone support. But the attitude I worry about is, to steal a phrase from IBM's FUD glory days,
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Lots of stuff works on the devices. tclsh was an easy port, but awfully large to just have around without a good reason. I ran the LambdaMOO server using JHCore. Robert Coie actually built a self-hosting gcc.
Of course, without any CF access yet, anything that won't fit on the 4M ramdisk is run over the 115kbps SLIP/PPP link on NFS...not the speediest disk you've ever used.
> and they are working on getting the GUI running (it seems to be already running on at least one of the developers' machines).
The demo works on my E-15 too. It's pretty much stock microwindows, with new touchpanel calibration code.
I can't find it. URL?
The interesting thing about MOO (if you mean the servers related to LambdaMOO) is that multiple users with varying levels of trustedness can extend the system.
There should be some rant here about how MOO servers leverage many of the qualities of Open Source software, but I'm too tired to spew the right buzzwords.
The closest shipping match to the Itsy are the Casio E-15 and E-100; with 69MHz/131MHz CPUs and 16M of RAM, they're somewhat larger machines than the 8M 486SX/25 I bought to run Linux 0.12, and you can get larger CompactFlash cards (IDE interface internally) than the 60M SCSI disk that was home for a few years. Both Casios are a bit bigger than the Palm III, although I suppose you could get an Everex Freestyle if you wanted the exact size.
If Digital---uh, I mean Compaq---had seeded the right places with proto hardware, I think the excitement about this project would be more justified. I'm glad they're finally releasing their port (dunno where, but this slide has it as a bullet); if nothing else, it will make work on other Linux PDA environments easier. But the commercial marketplace is serving up almost everything the Itsy hardware has except the prototyping ability today. That's where to funnel all that nervous energy you get when you think about how cool it would be to have a Linux PDA.
The reasons cited fall into two categories. The first look like:
But what worried me were some of the other reasons given for choosing Red Hat:
Those last few reasons are arguments for Red Hat regardless of technical or economic superiority.
Now, what may have happened here was that, in some organizations' cases, the people in charge of making the decision were already RH partisans. The justifications were easy-to-articulate surface statements, and their hard-to-articulate judgements that led them to that position didn't come out.
In some way, I'm glad that there are several distros out there that are close enough technically that this level of discussion is enough. But that won't always be the case if the sentiment in those last few statements overtakes enough of us.
Well, it obviously won't, at least not entirely. There will still be people out there who wipe their new Dell's RH installation to install SuSE, even if that blows away their phone support. But the attitude I worry about is, to steal a phrase from IBM's FUD glory days,
Jay