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["Joseph Mulloy" <jdmulloy AT gmail.com>]

Joseph Mulloy

jdmulloy AT gmail.com

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 5:55 AM, Poly-p man <polypolyman AT ibiblio.org> wrote:

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 don't really care too much about not having MMX
 

> 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"

Why bother with i686? Debian or even Gentoo would work fine on an i686 class machine, heck the machine I'm using for poly-p-ux could handle debian just fine, especially since I have more ram lying around that I could use. I've got two nearly identical i686 class machines if you want testing done. If you want at some point I could setup ssh access to the machines for you.
 

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?

Try it out, it Should work, it just calls modprobe and then appends whatever is on the current line of the file. I haven't made it too smart yet, so you can't do commments, (well it probably won't hurt anything but it will try to modeporbe your comments).

Just put "ne io=0x280 irq=3" into the file /etc/modules.autoload and it should 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!

I could try building for 386 but I don't have any to test on. Is grub really that slow on older machines?
 

> 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...

I tried to compile it statically on my Gentoo laptop and it wouldn't complie. When I removed the static flag I ran ldd on the binary and it had a large list of dependencies. It can probably be made to work hardware wise, but it may need a lot of disk space for all the dependencies. What's the target disk usage?
 

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
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