> Dennis Clarke wrote: >> If anyone has words of encouragement .. now would be a good time :-) > > Yeah, what Randy said. :) Anyway, yours is the type of testing, interest > and feedback we need to keep this project alive and moving forward, so > keep it coming. I know it's a bear to try to sort out all the failure > issues, but any (little) thing that can be done to weed out bugs or test > failures is indeed helpful.
I think that I will press on and try not to hit perfection. I'll strive for some degree of functionality with a few device drivers and then be happy. I fully expect that things will work out fine in the end. I have not yet had to look at any assembly .. so we are doing well. > Out of curiosity (not that it should matter by the time you reach > chapter 6) what is the host system you're using for the build? Sorry if > you mentioned it already and I missed it. It is called an EFIKA. Probably better to call it EFIKA rev 1.0 Here comes the gory details. 1) Here is the complete system. The hard drive is removed so you can see the system board : http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/efika/efika_004_m.jpg 2) A *nearly* mil-spec 18 gauge steel case was designed which would act as both protection as well as a natural heat sink. http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/efika/prototype_000.png 3) One of the first units off the assembly line : http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/efika/prototype_002.png 4) Really early .. beta type design : http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/efika/prototype_003.jpg http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/efika/prototype_004.jpg What I have here on my desk is the black steel case design with a Seagate drive on it. The firmware is OpenFirmware and the boot loader is my own port of GRUB2. The processor is a Freescale MPC5200B Power Architecture System-on-Chip design with 128MB of RAM. Here is a little movie of people doing nifty stuff with the early prototypes : http://www.pegasosppc.com/movies/efika_de.mp4 There is a rev 2 in the works, or so I hear. Faster proc and more memory. I expect that the original design objective was to have a deive with no moving parts that could run a modern OS ( Linux or OpenSolaris ) and so low power that it could run for *days* on a car battery with virtually no heat being produced. Pretty cool device huh ? I have installed the ATI Radeon graphics card in the past and used this as a desktop. It works just fine if you are willing to make concessions for both speed and disk IO rates. In bulk I would expect that the unit could get down to $99 per but that would require a really large volume. Anyways, it is damn fine technology in an itty bitty space. Dennis -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
