I'd ask this kind of question on the NetBSD/Dreamcast mailing list. The first thing you'll need to have is a BBA or Lan Adapter, otherwise there really isn't much you can do with the system.
My setup is a kernel burnt to a CD the proper way (compile kernel, strip to raw, run the scatter encryptor, burn using instructions on Marcus' web page), NFS mouting the root file system and the SWAP . It works well enough but I get stability problems with my Lan Adapter.
If you want an even easier way to do this from a Lan adapter or BBA, download and burn "DC-LOAD-IP". It's a boot image that lets you use a linux based file uploader to push an ELF binary to the system. This works great for testing out the newest compiles of the various emulators. Plus saves a fortune on screwed up burns;)
Overall though, the whole experience with DC hacking was fun:)
Macromedia did a great presentation to my org on the idea of turning websites into live applications with flash. As a web developer I found the whole idea to be quite cool. Flash seems to give a heck of a lot more flexiblity and control than any HTML/Javascript hackery I've seen. The apps I saw demo'ed were even communicating with a DB server using web services.
Flash has it's drawbacks of course (proprietary and non-indexable being pretty critical), but if opened up to a standards body, it could very well be the next HTML.
Built in web browsers don't usually add much to the final weight of the code. Normally they're just linked components to something that already exists in the OS. Most likely Real is embedding a Safari component, much like IE gets embedded on things in the windows world.
In my former job, multi IM clients were a life saver for me. Our on site management team used Yahoo, our clients used AIM, our developers used MSN and all my friends were on ICQ. These programs were made for people in my situation:)
Getting a bit old at this point, but it runs fanless. Power Color (not the best brand name in video) also sells a low profile version for those bastardized dell desktop cases.
>> You really think that 50,000+ people at MS had no inkling of this "linux" thing??
We had some MS reps (sales guy and a developer support guy) visit our organization a few weeks ago, and I have to say, they do have a very sour view of Linux in general but also have a decent understanding of how it all works. I was very impressed at the level of general OSS knowlege the developer support guy had, but in all fairness he seemed to have gotten it from working with FreeBSD.
They seem to have a lot of respect for FreeBSD at Microsoft, and I can't blame them I'm a fanboy myself. It might be because of the license, or just because of the community (I'm guessing the license:)
I think my utopian view of the computer industry would be Apple user interface with MS developing bread and butter apps and middleware, with FreeBSD as the core OS services. Put that on Sun hardware and you have a very nice computer. But we'd need some zelots to sell this idea to the world, I wonder where we can find those...;)
You can download snapshots of more recent source code on it's way to NetBSD 2.0 at ftp://releng.netbsd.org. I've had very positive experiences with the new kernel and userland so far, but YMMV.
I've had PHP4 running on a Quadra 610 (25Mhz) running NetBSD 1.6. I also had PostgreSQL running on the same machine, and according to apache bench I was still getting some decent page response times with simple db driven pages.
NetBSD seems to handle small hardware really well. This thing only had a 250 meg SCSI hard drive, and I could still install the base OS and all the web serving/db related packages and still have about 150 megs to spend on DB:)
I've been playing the game for a few weeks now (since a slashdot story mentioned it:), and I've found the game to be very deep and downright difficult to advance without the help of others. The first time you notice this is right on the newbie island where all characters start. Typically there are people trying to achieve one of their leadership tests (having other people build totems to them) on the newbie island acting as mentors. The mentors job is to help the newbies understand the game, and get them past the first challenge, which is to get from the newb island to Egypt mainland. This is the first time I've seen socilization rewarded in a game.
For Tale, it doesn't stop there. Once you are in Egypt, you realize the game is massive and complex. You simply can't build everything you need to advance your skills in the game without trading resources with others. The best way to do this is join a guild (or guilds, it allows multiple). Guilds in Tale are a social structure. Most likely you will join the guild that your mentor belongs to, and it will be your primary. Once you explore the world for a while, you find other people who want you to join their guild and might have resources not available to you in your current location.
I would almost say it's enforced socialization, but it doesn't feel that way when you play. Achievement is so much *easier* with socilization.
It would be cool if they sold some of these boards for the rest of us to play with, so we can say we "hack satellite control systems":)
The price on these Atmel cpu's at Digi-key is pretty good ~$30, but they seem to be obsolete. I'd put a board together myself, but it's well beyond my current electronics skills.
Speaking of Atmel, if anyone is interested in getting started on playing with embedded systems for cheap, they sell a nice line of 8 bit RISC (don't laugh, I'm serious) microcontrollers called AVR's. There is even a GCC and libc for it. No linux yet though;)
Easy to install, and runs great on these older machines. As well, maybe Abiword and Gnumeric. Kids might like to write, and do math homework and such.
If the box will be shipped with a pinter don't forget to portinstall APSFilter or magicfilter.
Web browsing will be quite bad on a box that small, but if it has enough memory (96-128m), Moz *will* work, and it provides email to boot.
Any games you can find that work on machines that small will be a big plus also. If the machine is a pure homework station, it won't be used as frequently:)
Sadly, the company I work for has taken this route with the American portion of the corporation. I however work in the Canadian portion, and as much as they threaten, I've yet to see the papers come for myself and my fellow developers/thinkers/inventors.
This is really, truly a sad turn of events for innovation (read: human social advancement) in general.
NetBSD has had SMP support for a few platforms in the -CURRENT branch for a while now (sparc, vax and alpha for sure).
Even with SMP support, I don't think you get a really high degree of concurrency unless you have a threading implementation that involves the kernel.
FreeBSD 4.x on a dual processor machine, for example, will take each process currently running, and assign it to a free CPU (either 0 or 1). This works great if you have more than one process running on your machine with a good division of labour (i.e. Apache + MySql).
However, there are times when you want your box to be dedicated to a single purpose like being a datbase server only. That database engine might be a single process application like Oracle, and was written to break it's own internal tasks off into threads.
A kernel thread implementation means you don't waste the second CPU of your SMP capable OS in this situation.
Way to go NetBSD team, for implementing this. I hope I get to see this in action in 1.7
The point of this (any) job is to keep people off public assistance. Telemarketers pay income tax just like you do, they provide for familys and contribute to the economy and the country in general, just like you do.
But hey, if you'd rather see the doors closed on these companies (10,000+ employees worldwide for the company I'm employed with), I'm sure you also wouldn't mind the tax burden associated with that.
I won't mind. I'll be living on a free taxpayer ride. Maybe I'll become a crimnal too, and take advantage of that great prison system!
I agree with you. But thus far, better jobs have not surfaced.
I live in a mining town where the unemployment rate is quite staggering. At this point, any job is worthwhile to these people. This is the same story heard in the east coast (Canada), single resource towns drying up because of lack of employment. These call centers we all hate are keeping these places alive.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that most people reading this post will be from a larger uban centers. I doubt many of you have seen a town "dry up". Especially one you grew up in, and thought of raising a family in. It's very disheartening. Before you say it, the arguement of "well, just move!" is not entirely useful. You might find the area you live tolerable, but some don't:)
Telemarketers are not evil as MacAndrew pointed out, they're not trying to help you loose weight by intterupting you during supper, they're just making ends meet until something better comes along.
If you have a better solution to high unemployment in small towns that doesn't inconvenience you, please speak up.
I work, as a programmer, for a company that does in-bound (customer care) and out-bound (telemarketing) business. I get just as annoyed at telemarketers as everyone else, but these calls are providing real employment for people who would otherwise be living marginal or supported lives.
Let them give you the spiel, say no POLITELY, and know you helped someone feed their family.
I have a collection of older machines (see my web page) some of which are quite bit slower than most 486's. I've found that when it comes to memory utilization, and hard drive space requirements, NetBSD is a good contender. You can reduce the memory footprint by recompiling the kernel (just like Linux), and get away with a usable system in 20 megs (without man pages or system source files).
I'm not trying to disuade you from installing Linux by this comment (I love Debian), just telling you about my OS of choice for older machines.
If you run X on a machine with 32 megs of ram and a small processor (P75+), you don't *NEED* to run TWM or Blackbox. Windowmaker runs quite nicely on a config that small, and has more features than both combined.
Besides the small memory footprint Windowmaker also features icon sized programs that sit at the bottom of your screen, called "docapps" which are usually monitoring programs. They take up very little space, and can provide tons of operational information at a glance. If you run windowmaker check out WMMon, WMCalClock, WMNet and WMApm (if you have a laptop).
The advice I got with this problem was to install Oracle on a Linux machine, and tar up the entire installed directory. Then just untar onto the FBSD machine and run.
Please don't trust my word on this though, ask the experts on the mailing list.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd ask this kind of question on the NetBSD/Dreamcast mailing list. The first thing you'll need to have is a BBA or Lan Adapter, otherwise there really isn't much you can do with the system.
;)
:)
My setup is a kernel burnt to a CD the proper way (compile kernel, strip to raw, run the scatter encryptor, burn using instructions on Marcus' web page), NFS mouting the root file system and the SWAP . It works well enough but I get stability
problems with my Lan Adapter.
If you want an even easier way to do this from a Lan adapter or BBA, download and burn "DC-LOAD-IP". It's a boot image that lets you use a linux based file uploader to push an ELF binary to the system. This works great for testing out the newest compiles of the various emulators. Plus saves a fortune on screwed up burns
Overall though, the whole experience with DC hacking was fun
Macromedia did a great presentation to my org on the idea of turning websites into live applications with flash. As a web developer I found the whole idea to be quite cool. Flash seems to give a heck of a lot more flexiblity and control than any HTML/Javascript hackery I've seen. The apps I saw demo'ed were even communicating with a DB server using web services.
Flash has it's drawbacks of course (proprietary and non-indexable being pretty critical), but if opened up to a standards body, it could very well be the next HTML.
Built in web browsers don't usually add much to the final weight of the code. Normally they're just linked components to something that already exists in the OS. Most likely Real is embedding a Safari component, much like IE gets embedded on things in the windows world.
In my former job, multi IM clients were a life saver for me. Our on site management team used Yahoo, our clients used AIM, our developers used MSN and all my friends were on ICQ. These programs were made for people in my situation :)
Napkins?! It should be done on an A8 ;)
Getting a bit old at this point, but it runs fanless. Power Color (not the best brand name in video) also sells a low profile version for those bastardized dell desktop cases.
>> You really think that 50,000+ people at MS had no inkling of this "linux" thing??
:)
;)
We had some MS reps (sales guy and a developer support guy) visit our organization a few weeks ago, and I have to say, they do have a very sour view of Linux in general but also have a decent understanding of how it all works. I was very impressed at the level of general OSS knowlege the developer support guy had, but in all fairness he seemed to have gotten it from working with FreeBSD.
They seem to have a lot of respect for FreeBSD at Microsoft, and I can't blame them I'm a fanboy myself. It might be because of the license, or just because of the community (I'm guessing the license
I think my utopian view of the computer industry would be Apple user interface with MS developing bread and butter apps and middleware, with FreeBSD as the core OS services. Put that on Sun hardware and you have a very nice computer. But we'd need some zelots to sell this idea to the world, I wonder where we can find those...
You can download snapshots of more recent source code on it's way to NetBSD 2.0 at ftp://releng.netbsd.org. I've had very positive experiences with the new kernel and userland so far, but YMMV.
Find a secluded field in the middle of nowhere, and bring a shovel... maybe a few friends.
:)
Either way, if anyone catches you claim you were digging up bodies for some sort of ritual, you'll do less time that way.
I've had PHP4 running on a Quadra 610 (25Mhz) running NetBSD 1.6. I also had PostgreSQL running on the same machine, and according to apache bench I was still getting some decent page response times with simple db driven pages.
:)
:)
NetBSD seems to handle small hardware really well. This thing only had a 250 meg SCSI hard drive, and I could still install the base OS and all the web serving/db related packages and still have about 150 megs to spend on DB
Check it out sometime, make that 33Mhz scream
.... really encourages socialization to advance.
:), and I've found the game to be very deep and downright difficult to advance without the help of others. The first time you notice this is right on the newbie island where all characters start. Typically there are people trying to achieve one of their leadership tests (having other people build totems to them) on the newbie island acting as mentors. The mentors job is to help the newbies understand the game, and get them past the first challenge, which is to get from the newb island to Egypt mainland. This is the first time I've seen socilization rewarded in a game.
I've been playing the game for a few weeks now (since a slashdot story mentioned it
For Tale, it doesn't stop there. Once you are in Egypt, you realize the game is massive and complex. You simply can't build everything you need to advance your skills in the game without trading resources with others. The best way to do this is join a guild (or guilds, it allows multiple). Guilds in Tale are a social structure. Most likely you will join the guild that your mentor belongs to, and it will be your primary. Once you explore the world for a while, you find other people who want you to join their guild and might have resources not available to you in your current location.
I would almost say it's enforced socialization, but it doesn't feel that way when you play. Achievement is so much *easier* with socilization.
It would be cool if they sold some of these boards for the rest of us to play with, so we can say we "hack satellite control systems" :)
;)
The price on these Atmel cpu's at Digi-key is pretty good ~$30, but they seem to be obsolete. I'd put a board together myself, but it's well beyond my current electronics skills.
Speaking of Atmel, if anyone is interested in getting started on playing with embedded systems for cheap, they sell a nice line of 8 bit RISC (don't laugh, I'm serious) microcontrollers called AVR's. There is even a GCC and libc for it. No linux yet though
Easy to install, and runs great on these older machines. As well, maybe Abiword and Gnumeric. Kids might like to write, and do math homework and such.
:)
If the box will be shipped with a pinter don't forget to portinstall APSFilter or magicfilter.
Web browsing will be quite bad on a box that small, but if it has enough memory (96-128m), Moz *will* work, and it provides email to boot.
Any games you can find that work on machines that small will be a big plus also. If the machine is a pure homework station, it won't be used as frequently
s/million-dollar/billion dollar
:)
I have this comic up in my cubical beside me
Sadly, the company I work for has taken this route with the American portion of the corporation. I however work in the Canadian portion, and as much as they threaten, I've yet to see the papers come for myself and my fellow developers/thinkers/inventors.
This is really, truly a sad turn of events for innovation (read: human social advancement) in general.
Give it a try. It really doesn't matter what kind of machine you have, as long as it's 32 bit and supports an Memory Mapping Unit, it should work ;)
Excellent, thanks for the info. I'm looking forward to NetBSD 2.0 now as much as I did for FreeBSD 5.0
The leaps and bounds in design that these guys are doing is impressive.
NetBSD has had SMP support for a few platforms in the -CURRENT branch for a while now (sparc, vax and alpha for sure).
Even with SMP support, I don't think you get a really high degree of concurrency unless you have a threading implementation that involves the kernel.
FreeBSD 4.x on a dual processor machine, for example, will take each process currently running, and assign it to a free CPU (either 0 or 1). This works great if you have more than one process running on your machine with a good division of labour (i.e. Apache + MySql).
However, there are times when you want your box to be dedicated to a single purpose like being a datbase server only. That database engine might be a single process application like Oracle, and was written to break it's own internal tasks off into threads.
A kernel thread implementation means you don't waste the second CPU of your SMP capable OS in this situation.
Way to go NetBSD team, for implementing this. I hope I get to see this in action in 1.7
I'm guessing this is a troll but...
:)
Prisons? I said they were poor not criminals
The point of this (any) job is to keep people off public assistance. Telemarketers pay income tax just like you do, they provide for familys and contribute to the economy and the country in general, just like you do.
But hey, if you'd rather see the doors closed on these companies (10,000+ employees worldwide for the company I'm employed with), I'm sure you also wouldn't mind the tax burden associated with that.
I won't mind. I'll be living on a free taxpayer ride. Maybe I'll become a crimnal too, and take advantage of that great prison system!
I agree with you. But thus far, better jobs have not surfaced.
:)
I live in a mining town where the unemployment rate is quite staggering. At this point, any job is worthwhile to these people. This is the same story heard in the east coast (Canada), single resource towns drying up because of lack of employment. These call centers we all hate are keeping these places alive.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that most people reading this post will be from a larger uban centers. I doubt many of you have seen a town "dry up". Especially one you grew up in, and thought of raising a family in. It's very disheartening. Before you say it, the arguement of "well, just move!" is not entirely useful. You might find the area you live tolerable, but some don't
Telemarketers are not evil as MacAndrew pointed out, they're not trying to help you loose weight by intterupting you during supper, they're just making ends meet until something better comes along.
If you have a better solution to high unemployment in small towns that doesn't inconvenience you, please speak up.
I know I'll get modded down for this :)
I work, as a programmer, for a company that does in-bound (customer care) and out-bound (telemarketing) business. I get just as annoyed at telemarketers as everyone else, but these calls are providing real employment for people who would otherwise be living marginal or supported lives.
Let them give you the spiel, say no POLITELY, and know you helped someone feed their family.
I have a collection of older machines (see my web page) some of which are quite bit slower than most 486's. I've found that when it comes to memory utilization, and hard drive space requirements, NetBSD is a good contender. You can reduce the memory footprint by recompiling the kernel (just like Linux), and get away with a usable system in 20 megs (without man pages or system source files).
I'm not trying to disuade you from installing Linux by this comment (I love Debian), just telling you about my OS of choice for older machines.
If you run X on a machine with 32 megs of ram and a small processor (P75+), you don't *NEED* to run TWM or Blackbox. Windowmaker runs quite nicely on a config that small, and has more features than both combined.
Besides the small memory footprint Windowmaker also features icon sized programs that sit at the bottom of your screen, called "docapps" which are usually monitoring programs. They take up very little space, and can provide tons of operational information at a glance. If you run windowmaker check out WMMon, WMCalClock, WMNet and WMApm (if you have a laptop).
I checked my "failed connect" logs and, no hits on port 5000 yet, nor in the last 5 weeks. Maybe it's not a kiddie toy yet?
The advice I got with this problem was to install Oracle on a Linux machine, and tar up the entire installed directory. Then just untar onto the FBSD machine and run.
Please don't trust my word on this though, ask the experts on the mailing list.