Re: Compaq Deskpro boards/hard drives from the late 1990s
On Tue, 27 Jul 2021 at 02:29, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: > > On 7/26/21 5:36 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: > > I got it down to 14MB and it would, just barely, boot from the 16MB > > SSD, although you could barely do anything as there was almost no > > free disk space. It was a vain effort in the end -- being so minimal, > > it booted in a few seconds from any medium. It did make the point > > for the magazine that an OS would boot from SSD in a fraction of the > > time of from hard disk -- and so that in some years, when SSDs were > > common and cheap, they would be very desirable. > > Interesting. It was a fun and interesting project to do, actually, and made more enjoyable by the knowledge that I'd get paid for it. :-D The general idea lived on in many ways (almost certainly _not_ inspired by the article that came out of my work). 98Lite was a useful tool that let you strip unnecessary bits out of Win98 & 98SE: https://www.litepc.com/98lite.html I used this to run 98SE minus IE and other junk on my Thinkpad 701C, the famed "butterfly keyboard" laptop, for a while. It took more resources than 95, but it let me have more than 4 IP addresses, which was a hard limit in 95. Around 2000 I was travelling internationally with that laptop and needed networking via multiple Windows network adaptors: PCMCIA Ethernet, plus dial-up modem + PPP, plus AOL, plus Direct Cable Connection, plus IRDA for my cellphone, and that became a deal-breaker with Win95. That's 5 network adaptors and they can't all run TCP/IP, even if they're not active. 98Lite inspired N-Lite, which could do the same for NT derivatives, including WinXP. https://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html I used N-Lite to build a custom installation CD ISO for the volume-license edition of XP SP3, which left out all the MS internet tools except IE (which you needed for Windows Update), removed Movie Maker and some other cruft you can't uninstall, turned off the Themes engine and set the Classic theme and a few other things. It made for a smaller, cleaner installation that was entirely compatible and could be used and updated as normal. I also made one for my own use which moved /"Documents and Settings" onto another partition and so on, but you had to make the partitions _just so_ in advance which crippled it. I later discovered someone else had had the same idea and distributed it, under the name TinyXP. I had this running in a VM under Linux and in base form it took just 40MB of RAM. Even with IE, updates and antivirus I had it running in 70MB of RAM. It's long obsolete but there is a copy on the Internet Archive which AFAICT is clean: https://archive.org/details/TinyXPRev11MultiInclTinyBIIAndMicroXP086EXPerience2010 TinyXP became Tiny7: https://archive.org/details/Tiny7 ... but I think in deliberate retribution, Win7 SP1 needs a complete install and so you can't install SP1 on Tiny7. At this point, the creator, known as eXPerience, gave up. Damned shame IMHO -- I'd love to see a Tiny10. > I've not really tried to do this on Windows. I have. :-) > But I would wonder if you > could mount an alternate file system on top of the Users / Documents and > Settings folder using -- what I believe is called -- Dynamic Data > Overlay. Very much like you would mount /home as a file system > independent from /. I don't know if there would be any dependency on > Administrator's profile being accessible before DDO mounted everything. Interesting idea. For me, TBH, more trouble than it's worth. I mostly run Linux on my PC kit now. > I suspect that more time is spent finding them and traversing the file > system meta-data than reading the actual config files. True. Even so, I have found that there's no perceptible difference, to me, on something like a Core i5 laptop, between / on SSD + /home on HDD, and the whole thing on SSD. > I've never tried to do anything like this with OS X. I would naively > think that you could mount another file system on /home. But, maybe > there's dependencies that I'm not aware of. Not easily. OS X dispenses with most of the Unix config files and it does not respond well if you try to half-nelson it into behaving like a traditional Unix. But after I emigrated to Czechia, I had enough money to stop using a Hackintosh and buy used Macintels. I moved my Toshiba laptop's 120GB SSD+ 1TB HDD into a Mac mini. I manually moved the home directory to the HDD and it worked fine. Until I bought the Retina iMac I am typing on, when I discovered I couldn't migrate my apps/settings/data. The migration tool can't handle a home directory on a different volume. And I couldn't reproduce the setup, as Apple fitted a 12GB SSD and you can't fit OS X onto that. So I had to manually copy everything, and then reset millions of files' permissions. It was a nightmarish job. > The only rare exception would be like having /home be a symbolic link to > /path/to/home which is on another file system. This is how I have my > VPS use LUKS encrypti
Branching the thread away from Compaq deskpro boards: "What We Have Lost"
This was a talk at a recent Chaos Computer Club congress: https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost#t=1707 « We have ended up in a world where UNIX and Windows have taken over, and most people have never experienced anything else. Over the years, though, many other system designs have come and gone, and some of those systems have had neat ideas that were nevertheless not enough to achieve commercial success. We will take you on a tour of a variety of those systems, talking about what makes them special. In particular, we'll discuss IBM i, with emphasis on the Single Level Store, TIMI, and block terminals Interlisp, the Lisp Machine with the interface of Smalltalk OpenGenera, with a unique approach to UI design TRON, Japan's ambitious OS standard More may be added as time permits. » It talks about Lisp Machine OSes, which interest me, but I especially liked that there's a demo of Interlisp as well as the better-known Symbolics OpenGenera. Unlike Genera, Interlisp is now FOSS and there is an effort afoot to port it to modern OSes and hardware and revive it as a Lisp IDE. There's also a not-very-inspiring but all too rare demo of IBM i. It's not pretty but this descendant of OS/400 is the last living single-level store in active maintenance and production. But the big thing that made me link to this after the discussion of DOS/V, Chinese Windows 3.2 and Japanese DR-DOS and DR GEM, was the demo of the final version of Japan's TRON OS. Most people have never heard of TRON but it was extraordinarily widely-used, embedded in billions of consumer electronics products. Well, there was also a desktop-PC version, with its own very rich object-oriented GUI, and this talk contains the only demo of it I've ever seen. -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: RP/M2 by Micro Methods Inc
On Sat, Jul 17, 2021 at 9:52 PM David Griffith via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > I found a copy of RP/M2 for the IBM PC by Micro Methods Inc. with manual > and some floppies, 8" and 5.25". According to the manual, this was a > CP/M compatible operating system. Doing a web search doesn't tell me > anything more than a couple offhand comments. Does anyone here know > anything interesting about this? > David, might you be willing to post it somewhere? I have a few V30 chips and have been wanting to try some CP/M-80 stuff on them out of sheer masochism. I've found some packages letting you run (some) CP/M-80 binaries from DOS, but it's interesting that RP/M2 is a full OS that doesn't run under DOS. > > -- > David Griffith > d...@661.org > > A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. > Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? > A: Top-posting. > Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? > -- Eric Christopherson
Re: Mounting ULTRIX CDROMs on Linux
On 2021-07-26 9:34 a.m., Maciej W. Rozycki via cctalk wrote: > On Fri, 21 May 2021, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote: > >> ISTR upstreaming some fixes to Linux UFS support 20+ years ago to address >> this very problem (IIRC OSF/1 or Digital Unix CD-ROMs were also UFS, and I >> had a need to access them under Linux for some reason) and with them in >> place I thought the loop device hack was not needed anymore. >> >> Perhaps my memory tricks me or something has since regressed though, e.g. >> due to changes in the block layer, so I'll try to remember to see what's >> happened here when I get to my Ultrix CDs when I'm in my remote lab next >> time. It's not a feature that's used on a regular basis after all, so any >> regression can be long-lived. > > I remembered right. An old Linux 2.4.26 kernel binary mounts a UFS CD > here using the old IDE hardware driver just fine with no need for block > size translation via the loop device: > > # mount -t ufs -o ro,ufstype=old /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom > # mount | grep ufs > /dev/hdc on /mnt/cdrom type ufs (ro,ufstype=old) > # uname -a > Linux (none) 2.4.26 #8 SMP Sat Aug 14 21:00:06 CEST 2004 i586 unknown unknown > GNU/Linux > # > > Not anymore with Linux 2.6.18 or anything newer: > > # mount -t ufs -o ro,ufstype=old /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom > mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc, >or too many mounted file systems > # dmesg | tail -n 1 > UFS: failed to set blocksize > # mount -t ufs -o loop,ro,ufstype=old /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom > # mount | grep ufs > /dev/hdc on /mnt/cdrom type ufs (ro,loop=/dev/loop0,ufstype=old) > # uname -a > Linux (none) 2.6.18 #9 SMP Sun Nov 26 18:31:10 GMT 2017 i586 unknown unknown > GNU/Linux > # > > So we do have a regression here, sigh. Thanks for the analysis. I would have speculated that the difference was in the SCSI CD-ROM driver for /dev/sr* devices since those are what are used in modern Linux distributions. But your results quite clearly show that's not the case. It also shows just how long ago the change happened. Very interesting.
Re: Branching the thread away from Compaq deskpro boards: "What We Have Lost"
On 7/27/21 4:27 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: This was a talk at a recent Chaos Computer Club congress: https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost#t=1707 « We have ended up in a world where UNIX and Windows have taken over, and most people have never experienced anything else. Over the years, though, many other system designs have come and gone, and some of those systems have had neat ideas that were nevertheless not enough to achieve commercial success. We will take you on a tour of a variety of those systems, talking about what makes them special. In particular, we'll discuss IBM i, with emphasis on the Single Level Store, TIMI, and block terminals Interlisp, the Lisp Machine with the interface of Smalltalk OpenGenera, with a unique approach to UI design TRON, Japan's ambitious OS standard More may be added as time permits. » Oh ... this looks interesting! It talks about Lisp Machine OSes, which interest me, but I especially liked that there's a demo of Interlisp as well as the better-known Symbolics OpenGenera. Unlike Genera, Interlisp is now FOSS and there is an effort afoot to port it to modern OSes and hardware and revive it as a Lisp IDE. There's also a not-very-inspiring but all too rare demo of IBM i. It's not pretty but this descendant of OS/400 is the last living single-level store in active maintenance and production. I've been discussing OS/400 / IBM i with a friend who owns three AS/400s. But the big thing that made me link to this after the discussion of DOS/V, Chinese Windows 3.2 and Japanese DR-DOS and DR GEM, was the demo of the final version of Japan's TRON OS. Most people have never heard of TRON but it was extraordinarily widely-used, embedded in billions of consumer electronics products. Well, there was also a desktop-PC version, with its own very rich object-oriented GUI, and this talk contains the only demo of it I've ever seen. Thank you for sharing. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
