[tech] A project idea...

[Grahame Bowland]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 10:18:14PM +0800, Leighton Haynes wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 10:00:04PM +0800, proXy wrote:
> > Being a particularly non-mac oriontated person, I wouldn't know exactly.
> > But I get the impression from that linux, that the mac version of the
> > os, will run on the older machines.
> > http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/hardware/supported.shtml
> > There is that other mac in the corner, which looks alot like the one
> > down the bottom of that page (once again I am showing my nonmacciness)
> 
> I believe the mac you want to install on is an LC630. YDL doesn't claim to 
> install on anything before PowerPCs. 
> 
> Besides, I'm one of these people that's sick and bloody tired of the
> 'install linux on everything'. Let's face it. Linux on PPC looks very
> much like Linux on x86. What's the fucking point? 

The point is to:
  o increase the instability of the linux distribution (as LOTS of 
    code just doesn't work as sizeof(int) != sizeof(void) on 
    some platforms)
  o bloat my debian mirror and make me revise my rsync filters
  o spread an ill-designed, poorly-scaling and not-so-stable 
    operating system. yay! [0]

To proxy re: porting Linux to those Macs; I'm pretty sure the old 
ones in the corridor are M68K based. They're not likely to have a 
Memory Management Unit and that means you can't have seperate kernel /
userland memory maps or enforse memory boundries between processes.

And that means that although you could hack out all of the memory 
management and task management (including security) from Linux you 
might not even be able to do pre-emptive multitasking without some 
awful hacks.

All and all, pointless :-)

> Oh, and just because I'm sick of reiterating it again and again. 
> No, I don't think Linux on PS2 is a good idea. It's a bad idea. 
> There are better solutions than crippling a really lovely architecture
> with a bloated OS>

Ok but how do you get into the swing of things without a nice
comfortable libc to use? :-) Or does the devkit give you the stuff to
bootstrap the platform and get you into some defined state?

-- 
"At a risk of being called sexist, ageist and French, if you put multimedia, 
a leather skirt and lipstick on a grandmother and take her to a nightclub, 
she's still not going to get lucky." - JLG on Windows

[0] I'll pay that this is flamebait. However, just looking at graphs 
    at performance between 2.2 and 2.4 and quite a bit of experience 
    doing Linux admin stuff makes me actually believe this. It doesn't 
    make me believe that anything else is necessarily better though :)