> > But Timothy is looking for projects that don't depend on video: > > > > At least nothing complex. If we had a simple RISC processor design > that was worth-while to put into an FPGA, we could do someone's X > server-on-a-card idea. In fact, we've got everything we need for a > powerful terminal. We can hook up serial, USB, ethernet, keyboard, > and mouse to the I/O bus on OGD1. We can put a CPU with basic video > logic into the FPGA. The CPU can have a few special instructions to > speed up some drawing operations, but most of the drawing would come > from regular general-purpose code plus perhaps a > bitblt-offload-engine.
Okay, I'm confused. Why is the above X11 server not complex but my audio/video server box idea complex? Is there a significant difference in complexity between an X11 server and a television server? I was thinking the same server could do both. I thought that FPGA is expensive and power hungry? > I'm not sure where we'd store the X server and basic OS kernel, > though. I suppose we could put a monitor/dumb terminal program in the > PROM that could accept an OS image upload/download from somewhere else > over the network. The X terminals I'm familiar with have either a small amount of PROM with bootstrap, diags, ping, download-the-X11-server, and human interface, or a larger amount of PROM with that plus the X11-server. Having the X11 server in PROM is very nice, it allows using the X terminal as a RS-232 console for headless computers without a catch-22 of needing the computer to be up to serve the X-server code to the X terminal and needing the X terminal up to see why the computer will not boot. If you have a problem booting the computer, you can use X's cut-and-paste to capture the messages. > The thing is, companies have tried over and over to sell stand-alone X > terminals, and they never had much success. I think NCD (and perhaps others?) was doing okay for awhile, then people decided they wanted a virus server box sitting on their desk. I think X terminals are great. Small and quiet. I don't want a big noisy box in my office. I don't want a big noisy box in my living room. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
