Re: debootstrapping m68k-coldfire
On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Michael Casadevall wrote: > I suspose the question needs to be asked; what are people doing with > their old m68ks. Just want to answer this one, despite not using debian, hope it's ok. I've been running linux on my old A1200/Blizz1230III more or less non-stop since early 1997, and before that there was a period of NetBSD as well. This machine is currently my web-server (http://amiga.nvg.org), hosts a few mirrors (of www.linux-m68k.org amongst others), hosts the Warlock ADF archive, and also used to run the UAE Board (which I btw should put online again). It does all this quite well, I think. Every night I get logs from apache in my mail, yesterday it had close to 3000 hits from well over 500 unique adresses :) A couple of years ago I bought a Blizzard 1260 for a second system, the old 030 with only 32MB RAM was tedious to build my gentoo/m68k packages on and I felt the need for speed ;) Last year I got an old Mac Quadra 610 up and running, and also bought an Asus Pundit P2 with a 2,13GHz core2duo to run emulators on. This one is now running Aranym where I do all my current package building. (Same box also runs a few Qemus for mipsel and armeb.) The old mac is my IRC server... all my machines each have a bot (SupyBot) installed and logs onto this IRC server (ngircd+stunnel for IPv6&SSL-reachability). Here they output tails of auth.log, emerge.log, messages and various other logs, and accept various commands from me and themselves. (For example they tell each other about ssh-scan attempts and block offending IP-addresses by adding them to /etc/hosts.deny) All machines also have a hobbit-monitor client installed for survialance, as well as a munin-client.sh that I use to collect statistics. They all have native IPv6 addresses, and have been "test beds" for various IPv6 related stuff and debugging :) So, my m68k related work these days involves updating packages every now and then with Aranym, test that they also work on my a1200-Blizz1260 system, and if it alls seems ok, also install them on my Q610 and a1200-Blizz1230. All binary packages are available directly on http://gentoo-m68k.kolla.no/ and sync'ed up to http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/default-linux/m68k/ I really should create a ram disk to install from and some stage files I guess, every now and then I get mail about this from people who want to try it out. -- kolla -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: debootstrapping m68k-coldfire
On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Michael Casadevall wrote: > I suspose the question needs to be asked; what are people doing with > their old m68ks. That's almost a FAQ on this list... This is what I do with my old m68ks, and why I think it might be useful: - I write code for them. In a small way that helps other ports. Having many ports is good because it tends to improve the common code and that benefits all users. - I learn from them. Writing code for the kernel teaches me a lot about computer architecture fundamentals, the code base and development process (as Brad mentioned). - I find problems by using them. Code bloat, churn and bit rot for example. Linux is supposed to be scalable and flexible. Using abstraction layers means that complexity shouldn't impact where isn't needed. Our port is a bell wether in that it reveals such problems early (e.g. the overhead in the "Completely Fair Scheduler". I think there is an open question as to the need for multiple algorithms with different time/space tradeoffs.) - I fix them. Linus said in a recent interview, "I want [Linux] to be the best." Well, I want the 2.6 kernel to work better than the older versions. A lot of effort from a lot people went into the pre-2.6 mac kernels only to lie abandoned in a CVS repo somewhere while the "latest and greatest" mainline kernel was left completely broken. That bothered me. - I preserve them. Some people like to restore antique furniture, cars, steam engines, whatever -- for me it is computers. Anyone who appreciates a museum or a period movie would perhaps appreciate that too. - I help repurpose them. Buying a fast GPU only to have it serve as a frame buffer is quite ludicrous. I'm not happy throwing away working equipment in the interests of questionable business models. - I do this stuff because I can! Open source is supposed to permit exactly what we are doing with it -- that is, it should cater to special interests. Moreover, a viral open source license has to deal with this somehow because every architecture faces obsolescence sooner or later. I think part of the solution is disintermediation (which begs Ingo's question, "perhaps m68k should drop debian"). It would be difficult to place a value on some of these uses and weigh them against the cost of serving a package archive or maintaining a port etc. I'm not going to try. There are other pursuits (like art or service to community) that can't be justified by that kind of analysis. As a teenager I learned structured programming on 68k macs and perhaps because of that I have a sentimental attachment to these machines -- call it nostalgia. All that may sound more like Frequently Questioned Answers (FQA) than a FAQ. That's fine, I like FQA's :-) -f -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
