The *official* poly-p-ux mailing list

[Poly-p man <polypolyman AT ibiblio.org>]

On Tuesday 05 August 2008 01:56:38 am Joseph Mulloy wrote:
> Hi all I've just installed poly-p-ux on the oldest working machine I
> have. It's a Gateway G5-233. Here are the specs.
>
> 233 MHz Pentium-MMX
> 32 MB 66 MHz SD-RAM
> 2564 MB Quantum Fireball HD

nice specs... too bad there's no actual MMX support in poly-p-ux :D

> I know it's at the upper end of what poly-p-ux is supposed to be for
> but it runs nice.

This time around, even though it's excruciatingly difficult to get releases 
going (because I have 3 - no, 4 systems I need to build twice each, then 
manually compile and configure everything...), I'm building an i686 version 
to support all the people who think their Pentium 2 box is "old"

1.0 is delayed, but only because it's hard to release... I'll put more effort 
into it probably today and over the next week.

> You may have seen me on the Gentoo Forums as jdmulloy. I thought I'd
> give this thing a try on real hardware. I've attached some edited init
> scripts to this email. I made the swap script use /etc/fstab to
> configure swap instaed of hard coding it into the script. All I needed
> there was the -a flag for swapon which actually does the work. I also
> made the modules script loop through a list of modules in
> /etc/modules.autoload to load kernel modules on boot. Hope you like
> it.

For swap, I think I tried that on one of my older incarnations, with an older 
busybox version - I think swaponoff -a has been added - I'll have to check 
the mailing list.

For modules... that is awesome! I was working on a modules.autoload system a 
while back... never got it to work. The most important part is options... for 
example, for my 486's network card, I need to load ne with the options 
io=0x280 irq=3. looking at your script, will that work?

Also... with my new, improved init, stop actually gets called... not that it 
matters with modules anyway... :D

> Is there anything that needs to be worked on? Any thing you need
> tested on i586? Can I get a copy of the build environment? Thanks.

Testing would be nice after release... currently I have nothing to test!

The build environment is Buildroot... I'll upload all my config files at some 
point.

If you want to be a huge help, get my builds of LILO going - I'm dropping 
grub 
because it's slow :D . Currently, my 486 box (upgraded to it's 850mb hard 
drive) is a complete development environment, so building LILO there wasn't 
an issue... if you could try building for all the archs (or at least static 
for 386), that would help me tons!

> It's nice to have this old box doing something useful again. At some
> point I'm going to see if I can get links to run on it, unless anyone
> knows of an even smaller browser.

That was one of the packages I was trying to get compiled on the old 
versions... links, lynk, elinks, anything... I had MAJOR trouble with that...

At the release of 1.0, I'll upload tarballs of the development environment 
(chroot into it to have fun) for people who care.

> I wrote this email on my Pentium box running  poly-p-ux on links
> running on my server which I'm accessing over ssh.

That's great! Honestly, just having a usable old system (even if it means 
using dropbear to connect to a server) means so much for this project... I 
have my 486 set up such that it's much more comfortable to use it... can't 
wait until I get kdrive and friends up - the system WILL be a beast... I know 
it :D

Thanks for showing an interest,
poly-p man