Geoff Winkless wrote... > > 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?
EeeeeeeeeeK! Linux?!? It's bad enough trying to compile it on this machine (486DX2/66 with 8MB memory, 10MB source code), although you could probably junk some of the drivers. But you're still looking at 6-10MB of C source code. Heaven only knows what a Z80 version would be like! > 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. I've got ArmLinux on my 4MB A5000 (Archimedes). That doesn't run at all... :( > My personal feeling is that we should try and aim for a basic Unix > system written purely in z80. This is a good idea. I like Unix. > 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. Well, Linux on this machine takes up around 3.5MB just booting up. It might be tricky to get it into 1MB... > 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'.. I'll be in it if people are going to give it a go... > Ideas, criticisms, personality assassinations to this group please! What about X as well? Now that *would* be impressive on a SAM... :) RJP ps RE: My stack problem was in conjunction with FORTH for the SAM. Still doesn't work though. :(
