Shane Kerr wrote:
>
> Huh? Not to open up a large can of worms here, but in my opinion the ONLY
> reason for ELKS is for something fun for its participants to do. The
> relative utility of 8086-class computers goes down every day. Consider
> that you can buy a used computer with a Pentium 60 with onboard video,
> IDE, serial, and parallel, 16 Mbyte of RAM and a 270 Mbyte hard disk for
> around $75, and run REAL Linux on it (check it out for yourself on any of
> the on-line auction web pages).
>
> If time is a factor, "we" have ALREADY lost! Our ancient computers aren't
> worth the electricity they consume! The only thing that matters at this
> point, is the love of hacking. Plus I hope to run Unix on my HP 200LX
> someday. :)
>
I have not contributed to the ELKS development effort in any way and
have just been monitoring this mailing list so far, but I'll put my two
cents worth in any way.
The reason I can see for ELKS is what first lead me to take an interest
in it -- the "E" in ELKS stands for "Embeddable." To me this means an
operating system that is designed to run on an "embedded" system (such
as a single board computer, hand-held device, industrial controller,
etc., typically with no hard disk, usually with the program and data
stored in ROM or flash memory, often times with no user interface).
There are many such operating systems available, but the ELKS I would
envision has a certain amount of appeal for the following reasons (some
of these may not be currently true):
freely available, with source code (and therefore customizable)
TCP/IP support
minimal hardware required (processor, RAM, ROM)
provides well-known programming environment (UNIX-based)
not controlled by any particular vendor, especially Microsoft
As such, ELKS may be able to address a part of the market that Microsoft
may otherwise fill with Windows CE (and other commercial operating
systems have been filling for years). Running ELKS on obsolete desktop
PC hardware as an end goal doesn't have as much appeal to me as running
it on embedded systems. Embedded systems seem more appropriate for ELKS
because they have commercial value (you can make money at it) and
embedded systems really need a small operating system.
Steve Drake
