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Re: gEDA-user: Free Dog meetings at MIT starting this September!
On Monday 23 August 2004 09:25 am, Karel Kulhavý wrote:
> It's only good. Breadboards suck. Airwire into a tin can is better
> IMHO ;-)
Agreed. But they come in handy for quick one-offs and prototypes. Same
with wire-wrapping.
> > Again, I don't fear SMT. Those $22 superscalar MIPS processors are
> > awfully appealing to me, and as long as I build for myself
> > exclusively, the idea of using $100 FPGA chips isn't that bad to me
> > (seeing as how it'll probably replace at least that much cost in
> > combined board space and discrete components anyhow).
>
> Is it possible to compile Linux on such a bugger?
I don't see why not. But my chipset wasn't going to be "Standard"
though, so device drivers and peripheral interfaces would need to be
changed. Otherwise, it's very much possible.
However, my interests lie elsewhere (e.g., Forth). As I said, I (and my
customers) am looking for a computer that is instant-on, no muss, no
fuss, no multi-user bull. Besides, unless you're really, really
careful, Linux can suck resources as fast as Windows now-a-days. Also,
how Linux handles shared libraries can only be described as utterly
retarded. The Unix-inspired architecture is definitely starting to show
its age.
The user of this machine should not have to be a system administrator.
Elementary OS and language built into ROM (both of which Forth provides
trivially), so that the computer is at least usable for something even
without a disk drive of any kind, even though it will have an IDE
interface. Of course, a more sophisticated, more feature-complete OS
can be loaded from disk if one is present.
Like I said -- something along the lines of a Commodore 64. And don't
tell me to use the Commodore 64 as a base; not only are they becoming
increasingly scarce, but increasingly impractical as well. The whole
point to this project is to explore what computing would be like if
technology marched on, but we still considered the needs of the *home*
computer user.
--
Samuel A. Falvo II