Re: [9fans] An old laptop

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Richard Miller]

rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com:
> ... The
> graphics for 640x480x8 are already 300 kilobytes,
> probably 600 once you have some windows.

I ran (and did useful work on) 2nd edition Plan 9 on a 486 with 4MB.
Used 640x480x1 to save bitmap space (the screen was monochrome anyway),
but that option doesn't seem so well supported in 3rd edition.

-- Richard

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Don]

> 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.
What version of BSD/OS?
Don
http://www.7f.no-ip.info/

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Lucio De Re]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 11:37:36AM +0100, Digby Tarvin wrote:
>
> Lucio De Re:

> > I don't like the PC parallel port, however, it seems to be quite
> > weakly supported all round.  My limited electronic knowledge does
> > not explain why, for example, my WinNT box has so much trouble
> > printing (admittedly past an HP scanner) - it positively grinds to
> > a ver slow pace.
>
> Early PC hardware did leave a lot to be desired. Unfortunately the
> machien pre-dates PCMCIA interfaces, so my only options are serial
> or parallel, and I don't think serial was much better...
>
Serial is slower but better implemented, ever since the 16550s, the
devices all seem to have identical characteristics, I am not convinced
that applies to the parallel port.

All in all, wired PPP at 115.2 kbps may be OK.

> Sure - if I could work out how to program it, it could be useful for
> a whole range of old machines that have parallel ports but need a
> LAN interface. If you can point me at such an archive, that would
> be great.
>
I'll ask.

++L

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Boyd Roberts]

I built an R2 demo floppy with 8 1/2, sam and ftpfs.

Made a pretty impressive demo.

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[bwc]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 182 bytes --]

In 1993 Rob had a very small demo all on a floppy.  I took a friend to
a computer store and booted it on one of the display machines and
gave a short talk on Plan 9.

 Brantley

[-- Attachment #2: Type: message/rfc822, Size: 1513 bytes --]

From: "rob pike, esq." <rob@plan9.bell-labs.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] An old laptop
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 08:41:55 -0400
Message-ID: <fe877d63b5416abdffc03fce2cbec69a@plan9.bell-labs.com>

> I am sure I remember Rob Pike giving a talk to AUUG in Sydney a long
> time ago, which included a demo of Plan9 running entirely from a floppy.
> I guess it has grown a little since then..

Much more likely, it was a system booted from a CD.  A variant of the
system fit on a floppy - and still does - but for demo purposes you always
wanted more on disk than could squeeze on a floppy.

-rob

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[rob pike, esq.]

As I said, a small version fit on a floppy, and still does, but when I gave
talks I used a CD.

-rob

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[rob pike, esq.]

> I am sure I remember Rob Pike giving a talk to AUUG in Sydney a long
> time ago, which included a demo of Plan9 running entirely from a floppy.
> I guess it has grown a little since then..

Much more likely, it was a system booted from a CD.  A variant of the
system fit on a floppy - and still does - but for demo purposes you always
wanted more on disk than could squeeze on a floppy.

-rob

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Digby Tarvin]

Lucio De Re:
> There are other parallel to ethernet adapters, Accton, for one,
> used to build such an item.

True, but while I could justify spending a little spare time fiddling
with it as a learning exercise, I would have a bit of trouble justifying
spending any money on this old machine.

> I don't like the PC parallel port, however, it seems to be quite
> weakly supported all round.  My limited electronic knowledge does
> not explain why, for example, my WinNT box has so much trouble
> printing (admittedly past an HP scanner) - it positively grinds to
> a ver slow pace.

Early PC hardware did leave a lot to be desired. Unfortunately the
machien pre-dates PCMCIA interfaces, so my only options are serial
or parallel, and I don't think serial was much better...

> Funnily enough, Russ Nelson, who was deeply involved with the
> ancient packet drivers for ethernet adapters (anyone remember him?
> he still hangs around lugnet and lego robotics, apparently) complained
> that Xircom had broken the packet drivers licence by adopting them
> for their adapters and refusing to disclose the details.

Yes - the Xircom was the first encounter I had with packet drivers.
With NCSA telnet, it made the Windows system usable as a network
terminal.

> Might explain why they insist on so much secrecy.
>
> Going back to Accton, someone recently mentioned finding the details
> of just such a device from some site that archived drivers that
> Accton had stopped providing, I don't recall the exact details,
> but I can find out more if it helps.

Sure - if I could work out how to program it, it could be useful for
a whole range of old machines that have parallel ports but need a
LAN interface. If you can point me at such an archive, that would
be great.

Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Lucio De Re]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 10:51:30AM +0100, Digby Tarvin wrote:
>
> 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 are other parallel to ethernet adapters, Accton, for one,
used to build such an item.

I don't like the PC parallel port, however, it seems to be quite
weakly supported all round.  My limited electronic knowledge does
not explain why, for example, my WinNT box has so much trouble
printing (admittedly past an HP scanner) - it positively grinds to
a ver slow pace.

Funnily enough, Russ Nelson, who was deeply involved with the
ancient packet drivers for ethernet adapters (anyone remember him?
he still hangs around lugnet and lego robotics, apparently) complained
that Xircom had broken the packet drivers licence by adopting them
for their adapters and refusing to disclose the details.

Might explain why they insist on so much secrecy.

Going back to Accton, someone recently mentioned finding the details
of just such a device from some site that archived drivers that
Accton had stopped providing, I don't recall the exact details,
but I can find out more if it helps.

++L

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Digby Tarvin]

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

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Boyd Roberts]

Digby Tarvin wrote:
> I have an ageing Toshiba 1850C laptop, with 4Mb of ram ...

I put R2 on a 386 with 4Mb and that required some trickery.

It just isn't viable.

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Don]

> I have an ageing Toshiba 1850C laptop, with 4Mb of ram and 160MB of disk.
> Certainly not up to the task of running modern bloated operating systems
> from Microsoft, and only able to run BSD Unix by omitting the graphical
> environment.
>
> 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 :)

> 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
Don
http://www.7f.no-ip.info/

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Digby Tarvin]

Hi Russ,

> Do you mean "terminal server" or just "terminal"?
> If the former (as in serial concentrator), you
> might be able to pull something off, but it seems
> unlikely.

I was thinking the latter - appologies if I didn't get the Plan9
terminology wrong..

> If the latter, I think you're out of luck.  The
> graphics for 640x480x8 are already 300 kilobytes,
> probably 600 once you have some windows.

Ah, and you just reminded me that with memory limits of this
generation machine, it may well be that the display is not 8 bits
deep, which presumably would be a killer too.

> Mail, acme, plumber, fs, and rio are all at
> least half a meg each.  And then the kernel and kfs
> will want some memory too.  It might fit, but
> you wouldn't be able to breathe.
>
> The install certainly won't work on it -- the install
> needs 32MB of memory.  The in-memory file system itself
> is almost 4MB.
>
> Doesn't seem worth it to me.
>
Thanks for your advice. It was the 32MB requirement for installing that
had a faint recollection of, and sounds like a bit of a killer unless
I install on the disk from another host.

It does sound like I would be banging my head against a wall a bit trying
to get some use out of the little beast - I just hate throwing away a
machine which works :-/

I can't say I thought of Windows 3.11 as a lean, efficient operating system
when I got the laptop, but it sounds like it was relatively speaking..

I still remember when a 5MB hard disk was a big deal and 64K was a
'theoretical' memory expansion limit. But admittedly that was before
graphical user intefaces became common.

I am sure I remember Rob Pike giving a talk to AUUG in Sydney a long
time ago, which included a demo of Plan9 running entirely from a floppy.
I guess it has grown a little since then..

It sounds like the best application for this old machine would be a non-
graphical system, like BSD without X, or OS-9000 - the latter is an
evolution of a real-time multi-user time sharing system originally running
on a 6809, and is still lean enough to make such an old beast feel like
it has limitless resources.

Thanks again for your comments.

Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk

Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Russ Cox]

Do you mean "terminal server" or just "terminal"?
If the former (as in serial concentrator), you
might be able to pull something off, but it seems
unlikely.

If the latter, I think you're out of luck.  The
graphics for 640x480x8 are already 300 kilobytes,
probably 600 once you have some windows.
Mail, acme, plumber, fs, and rio are all at
least half a meg each.  And then the kernel and kfs
will want some memory too.  It might fit, but
you wouldn't be able to breathe.

The install certainly won't work on it -- the install
needs 32MB of memory.  The in-memory file system itself
is almost 4MB.

Doesn't seem worth it to me.

Russ

[9fans] An old laptop

[Digby Tarvin]

Hello all,

I have an ageing Toshiba 1850C laptop, with 4Mb of ram and 160MB of disk.
Certainly not up to the task of running modern bloated operating systems
from Microsoft, and only able to run BSD Unix by omitting the graphical
environment.

The obvious question is - could it be gainfully employed as a Plan9
terminal server?

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.

Has anyone made a Xircom driver? Parallel network? Would a serial
network give adequate performance?

I can probably increase the disk size using something discarded from a
more recent laptop - I know the BIOS won't see the extra space, but
if it boots, a decent OS should.

Any other obvious problems.

Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk