Zombie OSes – OSes that aren’t dead, but they aren’t the most alive, either

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I’m probably going to piss a few people off with this, but it’s something that’s been rattling around in my head for a while, and I wanted to get it posted somewhere. This might not even make much sense. 😉 Also, please note that I’m not knocking your favorite OS when I classify it as a zombie OS.

So, what is a zombie OS? A zombie OS is an OS that “should have” died, but has been kept alive and at least somewhat up to date by its community. Or, maybe it really did die, but its community has brought it back. (By “should have” died, I don’t mean that the OS deserved to die, just that the situation that it was in meant that it would have died if it weren’t for the community.) Either way, it’s now “undead,” if you will.

Most zombie OSes are now considered hobby OSes – OSes that most people play with for fun, and then reboot into a more mainstream OS (or switch to a more mainstream computer) for daily work. That said, there are often many die-hard users that use such an OS as their primary OS. At one time, most of these OSes were commercially sold, but their developer has abandoned the OS, or has gone out of business. That doesn’t mean that there’s not a new owner commercially selling it to the hobby market – in fact, in many cases, that is the case.

Why use a zombie OS? Quite a few reasons. For starters, nostalgia – you may have used the OS before, you liked it, so why not play around with it nowadays? That happens with a lot of dead OSes, too – OSes that have truly been abandoned, and the community around it exists solely to have fun with stuff they used years ago. Alternately, maybe you’ve always been using it, it fits your needs the best, or it has some features that you really like, so why stop now? Or, maybe you’re interested in using alternatives to the mainstream OSes, and as zombie OSes were usually well supported in their past, there’s usually more support available for them than for OSes that began as hobby OSes.

So, what is there to know about them? Continue reading “Zombie OSes – OSes that aren’t dead, but they aren’t the most alive, either”

HP t5325 thin client, RISC OS, and maybe combining the two. Or just running Linux on it. Either way.

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If you follow this blog, you may remember that I’ve mentioned RISC OS, the OS used on ARM-based computers made by Acorn Computers. The OS has a very loyal following, and as an “outsider,” I found it (and the hardware, for that matter) interesting.

However, as Acorn pulled out of the personal computer market in 1998, the community has had trouble obtaining hardware since. Many users still use circa 1997 RiscPCs with 200 or 233 MHz StrongARM CPUs, which just don’t cut it today. While there were a few clones made after the fall of Acorn, most notably the Iyonix (with a 600 MHz XScale,) and the A9home (with a 400 MHz Samsung ARM9-based system on chip,) these machines are expensive for what they are, and the Iyonix is no longer in production. It’s proven to be difficult to make custom hardware specifically for this market, as the RISC OS community can’t afford custom chips designed for RISC OS machines, so they’re required to use embedded chips that provide suboptimal performance, and the low volume causes extremely high hardware prices to make up for development and tooling costs.

But, ARM is now pushing their architecture into the netbook and nettop spaces, countering Intel’s attempt to move into ARM’s traditional smartphone and embedded spaces. This means that there’s now PC-class ARM hardware. And, the best part is, someone else is paying for the development, and ARM wants the volume to be huge.

Not only that, but Castle Technology, the company that makes the Iyonix, has released their version of RISC OS under a shared source license, to RISC OS Open. This has allowed developers to take advantage of the new ARM platforms. Right now, there’s a port to the Beagle Board, although it’s arguably not well suited towards desktop applications, due to its lack of any form of ATA support, and poor 2D graphics capabilities – the OMAP3530 chip that it’s based on is essentially a cell phone chip. Also, it’s a developer board, so there’s no good case for it. But, there’s an ARM platform that’s low-cost, commercially available, and does offer SATA, good 2D graphics, and a case. Continue reading “HP t5325 thin client, RISC OS, and maybe combining the two. Or just running Linux on it. Either way.”

Starting a documentation and file collection project for the Sun-1

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For a few months now, I’ve been interested in Sun workstations, and when you seriously (or even not so seriously) get into a hobby, you sometimes start looking into its history. While looking into Sun’s history, I’ve found that information on the early Sun workstations (that is, those before the Sun-2 line) is extremely scarce, and scattered across the Internet. While I was able to find what I was looking for at the time, even a few months later, I’ve lost some of those links. Therefore, I decided to start an archive for information about the Sun-1 and its predecessors, and for files for those machines. It’s currently hosted off of my own personal server, although mirrors would be appreciated. If you wish to contribute to this project, either by providing information, files, or providing a mirror, please let me know. Here’s the information I’m looking for:

  • Any documents published by Stanford University about the Stanford University Network hardware
  • Any documents published by VLSI Systems about the SUN hardware sold by that company
  • Any documents published by Sun Microsystems about Sun-1 workstation models with 68000 (not 68010) CPUs
  • Any documents published by third parties about the above systems, or hardware included in these systems
  • Firmware for any of these systems
  • Software for any of these systems, especially UniPlus V7 Unix
  • High-resolution images of circuit boards, including:
    • SUN and Sun-1 68000 CPU boards
    • SUN and Sun-1 framebuffers, both monochrome and color
    • SUN and Sun-1 memory boards
    • Disk controller boards used in SUN and Sun-1 systems, including the Interphase SMD 2180
    • Ethernet boards used in SUN and Sun-1 systems
    • Any other boards of interest for the SUN and Sun-1
  • Screenshots and photographs of SUN and Sun-1 systems in operation
  • Personal accounts of using SUN and Sun-1 systems

The SPARCs are flying…

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This is probably the fault of a few in the A2Central IRC channel, but I’ve gotten into Sun stuff, it seems.

First, it started with a Sun Ultra 1E, that I named sparcgap, that I got for $20. 200 MHz UltraSPARC, Creator3D graphics, 832 MiB of RAM, and 59 GB of hard drive space (although the 50 gig drive was half height. Protip: Half height means “as thick as an optical drive,” not “normal height for a hard drive.” This meant that the 9 gig drive barely fit, with no airflow between the drives, so I removed the 9 gig.) I installed Solaris 9 on it, but haven’t done much with it. It provides some additional heat for my apartment, and it occasionally gets used to play streaming radio.

Then, recently, I visited a friend of mine, Jeri Ellsworth, to hack on some pinballs, and hang out. She ended up giving me an RDI PowerLite 50. Unfortunately, a previous owner had raided it for the LCD cable (and the RAM upgrade board, and the battery, and this, and that…,) but I got it up and running on an external monitor. It’s got a 50 MHz microSPARC, 16 MiB RAM, a 640×480 LCD, and two 525 MiB hard drives. It’s roughly equivalent to a SPARCclassic. I installed Solaris 2.5.1 on it, named it leydenjar (an early capacitor, which… is a way to store a spark and take it with you. This laptop is an early way to take a SPARC with you. I know, terrible,) and for the lulz, decided to install Internet Explorer 5 for UNIX. Bad idea. Well, Internet Explorer is almost always a bad idea, but I mean, this was a really bad idea. See, IE 5 isn’t set up to work well in 16 megs of RAM on Solaris. 😉 But, this machine’s getting restored soon, and part of that will be to add more RAM, hopefully.

Anyway, then, I stumbled on a thread over on Nekochan. In that thread was a link to an auction for some Sun Blade 2500s. $170 and free shipping, for a dual 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC IIIi with 2 GiB of RAM? Sign me up!

Not sure what graphics card mine has yet, and there’s no hard drive (although I bought a 73 GB SCSI drive for it, and have a spare drive caddy if it’s needed.) I intend to run OpenSolaris on it, so the lowest-end XVR-100 is actually the best bet for compatibility.

I’ll be naming the machine brescia. Brescia, Italy was the site of what’s believed to be the worst lightning disaster in recorded history, when in 1769, lightning struck the Church of Saint Nazaire. This wouldn’t have been that huge of a deal, except for the little fact that 100 pounds of gunpowder were stored in said church. 3000 people died, and 1/6th of the city was levelled. So, it was the spark that did the most damage… well, a machine with a dual 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC IIIi is the SPARC workstation that does the most processing. (You can tell, my SPARC boxes get TERRIBLE names. :lol:)

Of course, I’ve installed OpenSolaris on my (Acer Aspire One D250) netbook, too. Got some power management issues, and some printing issues, but otherwise like it so far, with one exception – why, exactly, is pfexec not passworded? I get the reason for having pfexec, it makes perfect sense… but I think not having passwords on it greatly reduces its security, and therefore its usefulness.

New project idea that I’m starting… the LoCoRap

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So, you’ve probably heard of the various 3D printer projects as of late, including the RepRap and MakerBot’s CupCake CNC. However, they’re expensive. A RepRap will cost at LEAST $500, and a CupCake starts at $750.

Also, at least the RepRap has some steps that require special skills and tools to assemble – the extruder, for instance, requires a CNC lathe. While I’m a newbie to all of this, it also seems like there are some design decisions on the RepRap that make it more complex, harder to assemble, and more expensive in the long run, although they do make it easier for it to print parts for itself. Case in point, this blog post where a commenter’s main criticism of a possible improvement to the RepRap is that it reduces self-replicatability.

But, why have a $500 machine that can print parts for itself when you can have, for instance, a $100 machine that instead uses readily available off-the-shelf parts with simpler modifications? (And, theoretically, that $100 machine could act as a RepStrap, or a machine that can print the parts required to make a RepRap.) Continue reading “New project idea that I’m starting… the LoCoRap”

Scary thought of the day: Windows Mobile is the most open smartphone operating system.

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You’re probably thinking, “what? How can that be? Android has to be the most open, it’s open source, right?”

And you’d be right… until you get into actual Android devices that are for sale. Other than the Google Dev Phone 1 (which has some other restrictions,) all of the devices are locked down at least somewhat.

There is one exception to my point – in one or two ways, Palm OS is more open than Windows Mobile. However, Palm OS is irrelevant nowadays, but I’ll include it in the comparison anyway. Continue reading “Scary thought of the day: Windows Mobile is the most open smartphone operating system.”

Oh noes, moar computers, and amateur radio!

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So, let’s start with the computer stuff…

I managed to get an Acorn RiscPC. For those not familiar with the machine, it’s an ARM-based machine running RISC OS (a cooperative multitasking ROM-based GUI OS originally developed by Acorn.) My particular machine has a 233 MHz DEC StrongARM, 96 MiB of EDO RAM, 2 MiB of VRAM, an ethernet card, and a DMA IDE card (faster than the on-board IDE, and more compatible.) I’m currently running it with a 4 GiB CompactFlash card for storage.

It’s amazingly useful, despite the fact that this CPU came out in 1997. Word processing, e-mail, all that. Hell, even web browsing – it’s not great, but it works, with NetSurf. There’s also a Firefox port, but it’s uselessly slow, unfortunately – Firefox bloat plus a twelve year old processor equals dog slow.

Oh, and with a program called Murnong, it’s actually possible to watch YouTube videos. Of course, it takes almost half an hour to convert a 5 minute video to be playable.  😆

But, it’s still a quite interesting platform to use… best bet is to read the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club’s introduction to RISC OS.

Now, what else is there to talk about… oh, yeah, amateur radio. So, I was at Notacon 6, and they had amateur radio exams. Decided to go for my license, and now have a Technician class license. (Next year, I’ll probably go for General, but I hadn’t studied for it this year.) KD8KXK is on the air.  😀

I think that’s all for now…

Green software?

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So, lately, people have been making a big deal about green hardware – hardware that’s produced using environmentally friendly methods and uses as little power as possible.

But what about green software? You don’t really hear all that much about that. And, all this green movement right now is, make slower hardware, and expect users to put up with it. It works because hardware arguably passed the “fast enough” point in the past few years.

However, for a lot of tasks, we arguably should’ve passed the fast enough point 10 or 15 years ago. Word processing and web browsing are not rocket science, for two examples. Operating systems (all of them, yes, I’m even looking at you, modern Linux distributions) are bloated. Let’s not even talk about Adobe’s stuff.

Why isn’t there an equivalent green software movement? Improve compilers, strip out bloat, don’t pull the “you’ve got the CPU power, don’t worry about optimization” card. That way, we can either use slower CPUs and have quite good performance, or our current CPUs and run them at partial load (resulting in less power consumption) or have mindblowing performance.

I know, I know, that’d require actual work.

But, just a thought.

Public Service Announcement – Twitter is not IRC or IM

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Using @ messages to carry on a conversation? Maybe you’re using the wrong medium.

Twitter is not an IRC channel. It is not an IM client.

Twitter is a service for posting what you’re doing.

The occasional @ message is OK, but carrying on a conversation with @ messages… not cool.

This concludes your Public Service Announcement. 🙂

YourFonts – DIY font creation

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So, for whatever reason, you want to make a font. Be it your handwriting, or whatever.

Looks like you can do it now… there’s this service called YourFonts.

You simply print out a sheet, fill it in, scan it, and then it generates a font from that. Or, you could download a copy of the sheet and fill it in in a graphics program, if you wanted to make a font that way.

I decided to do one myself:

Oh, and I used an extra fine point Sharpie, and it still worked great. 🙂

Thanks, Rich, for the tip. 😀