From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200204230951.KAA22311@cthulhu.dircon.co.uk> Subject: Re: [9fans] An old laptop In-Reply-To: <8f6cf824.0204221851.61651a27@posting.google.com> from Don at "Apr 23, 2002 09:09:35 am" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Digby Tarvin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 10:51:30 +0100 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 79e386ee-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Hi, > > The obvious question is - could it be gainfully employed as a Plan9 > > terminal server? > > > Well, it seems u are interested in graphics. However, you could always boot > Plan9 over an ether connection via a boot disk and use another machine's > file server capability. Also, utilize a CPU server for ur work. This would > eradicate the confining hard disk space u have as well as the lacking CPU > power. The only compromise, really, is the necessity of running without > a windowing environment. Though, with ed and the usual plan9 command line > functionality I don't really see the overall disadvantage. I, personally, > will take another box however I can get it :) Yes, that is what I had in mind. > > The challenge I see is that the only ethernet connectivity it has is > > a Xircom PE3 (parallel port adapter). The alternative is to use a > > parallel or serial based network connection (PLIP/SLIP etc). > > > > Anyone tried a setup like this? Is the memory sufficient? I seem to recall > > that small memory was a problem during the install process at one time. > > > With a boot disk u don't need to install it, just boot it via the floppy. Your > only issue would be hacking up a boot disk that uses Xircom parallel networking. > I know lanl has a Xircom PCMCIA driver, but, I do not know how much > functionality Xircom has layered from the actual device interface. Maybe > coding up a parallel driver wouldn't be too hard? > > I hope you give it a try ;) Would be nice to see it work I would quite like to have a go at a driver, but the stumbling block was that Xircom were never willing to release programming information for the PE3. There was a BSD/OS (commercial BSD) driver, which is how I have been able to use Unix on it, but BSDI had to agree not to release the source in order to obtain the information from Xircom. So I guess unless someone interested in Plan9 has worked for a company with access to this information and written a driver, or someone has managed to reverse engineer a driver, it is not going to be easy. I wonder if anyone has gotten a Linux driver to work - if so I might be able to glean the programming details from that... Thanks for your comments. Regards, DigbyT -- Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt@acm.org http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk