With the impending possibility of a decent-speed sam, the imminence of various Hard Drives and the arrival of the (bare bones, admittedly) C compiler, who would be interested in porting Linux (or BSD) to the new machine?
Sam as it stands just isn't capable of this kind of system, but with 4M RAM, a hd and c compiler we could knock something up that might be worth running. My personal feeling is that we should try and aim for a basic Unix system written purely in z80. People say `use C' but unfortunately that way lies code bloat. Original systems fitted in to 64k. I would suggest that it would be possible (if the z380 has a decent MMU) to write a functional unix (by todays standards) that could run on a single meg without too much disk hammering, but most of the core would -have- to be written in z(3)80 code. As will be patently obvious I haven't really thought this through but this would -not- be a short or particularly easy job, something of a labour of love. More a question of `yes it is possible' rather than `hey let's make everyone buy a sam'.. Ideas, criticisms, personality assassinations to this group please! --
