Groups > alt.folklore.computers > #151377

Re: New hard drive

From	Morten Reistad <first@last.name>
Newsgroups	alt.folklore.computers
Subject	Re: New hard drive
Date	2015-09-15 13:43 +0200
Organization	Me, Myself and I
Message-ID	<9sclcc-0t2.ln1@sambook.reistad.name> (permalink)
References	<mstass$3vb$2@dont-email.me> <mt6ofv$o4l$1@dont-email.me> <20150915100839.fb4527864a22c4e1ca20f50f@eircom.net> <mt8roe$asb$1@dont-email.me>

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In article <mt8roe$asb$1@dont-email.me>, philo  <philo@privacy.net> wrote:
>On 09/15/2015 04:08 AM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>> On Mon, 14 Sep 2015 10:20:16 -0500
>> philo <philo@privacy.net> wrote:
>>
>>> My first Linux install was on a 486 with a 170 meg HD and I did not
>>> install a GUI...just wanted to see if I could do it.
>>
>> 	Mine came off about 50 floppies onto a 486DX25 with 16MB of RAM.
>> I'd already had a unix on the box without TCP/IP for which I compiled X
>> from the X11R5 distribution (building the missing half of the pseudo-tty
>> transport to do so). Getting X up on Linux was *so* much easier.
>>
>
>
>
>
>The 486 I used...was 33mhz. The biggest bottleneck how ever was an 
>extremely slow HD. ( Possibly PIO 2 or 3) I know that the machine was 
>not in the same league with the PS/2 (I still have) that also used a 33 
>mhz cpu.

I tested Linux first on a re-assembled machine from previous top-of-the-line
386 servers, with _lots_ of memory and cache, and two _very_ fast ide
disks, 110 and 120 mb. It was around two weeks after you didn't have
to build the file system from minix anymore, where you could use a
distro. My memory fails me of the name of this distro.

I got the character inteface up within a day, and struggled to get 
the display beyond svga, going into driver hell. I got 768x1024(?), but
the display could do a lot more. That took a few months to sort out.

>Eventually I learned that in setting up the x-server...If I needed to 
>get /something/ going right away...VESA would usually work.

Or svga. 

This driver hell has plagued the relationship between the open source
and alternative OS vendors and the hardware pushers for decades. 

New fancy hardware, requires magic software the hardware guys seem
to think. So they guard the specs for the API interfaces, and the
open source people have to reverse-engineer some proper drivers.
The ones coming from the hardware vendors are uniformly shitty, at
least in the firt 2 major versions. I have confirmation that this
problem also plagues Microsoft, but they use their market muscle
to force out specs and good drivers.

It was like this for graphics drivers until ca 2008, for wifi cards
until a few years ago, and for graphics accelrators it is still like
this.

That this locks the hardware vendors out from the market of Linux/BSD
users, which has become sizabe, still seem to elude them.

>I never bothered to compile my own packages with one exception:

I did the kernel build with -Os and explicit options to build for
the processor in use. It made a difference in speed. The processor
was an 80386 with so high clock speed and cache memory (ISTR 8m
cache, 16m real memory; we took all the cache chips from 8 motherboards
that were being recycled).

>Since RH5.2 did not have USB support, I compiled a USB kernel.
>Unfortunately I never did get USB going. I found out many years later 
>that I might have needed to add a module (?) for the particular USB card 
>I added to the machine. Compiling a new kernel was still a good 
>excercise to have done.

USB drivers seem to have been an exception from the rule above.
Likewise, the fast ethernet (>= 1G) drivers seem to be seamlessly
integrated into Linux.

-- mrr

Thread

New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-10 20:33 -0500
  Re: New hard drive Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2015-09-10 23:23 -0400
    Re: New hard drive Bob Martin <bob.martin@excite.com> - 2015-09-11 07:07 +0100
    Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-14 10:20 -0500
      Re: New hard drive Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2015-09-14 13:53 -0400
        Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-14 13:05 -0500
          Re: New hard drive Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2015-09-14 15:09 -0400
            Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-14 14:18 -0500
      Re: New hard drive Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> - 2015-09-15 10:08 +0100
        Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-15 05:28 -0500
          Re: New hard drive Morten Reistad <first@last.name> - 2015-09-15 13:43 +0200
            Re: New hard drive Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> - 2015-09-15 16:19 +0000
              Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-15 13:15 -0500
                Re: New hard drive Stan Barr <plan.b@bluesomatic.org> - 2015-09-16 07:04 +0000
                Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-16 08:39 -0500
                Re: New hard drive Joe Makowiec <makowiec@invalid.invalid> - 2015-09-16 14:52 +0000
                Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-17 15:37 -0500
                Re: New hard drive scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2015-09-16 13:42 +0000
              Re: New hard drive Walter Banks <walter@bytecraft.com> - 2015-09-15 15:34 -0400
                Re: New hard drive Dan Espen <despen@verizon.net> - 2015-09-15 17:29 -0400
                Re: New hard drive Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> - 2015-09-16 22:00 +0000
                Re: New hard drive Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2015-09-17 03:58 +0000
                Re: New hard drive "Charles Richmond" <numerist@aquaporin4.com> - 2015-09-17 00:43 -0500
                Re: New hard drive Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2015-09-17 05:59 +0000
                Re: New hard drive Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> - 2015-09-17 11:51 +0000
                Re: New hard drive hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com - 2015-09-17 13:18 -0700
                Re: New hard drive Walter Banks <walter@bytecraft.com> - 2015-09-17 19:15 -0400
                Re: New hard drive "Jim Thomas" <JT@nospam.com> - 2015-09-20 17:27 +1000
                Re: New hard drive hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com - 2015-09-17 13:13 -0700
                Re: New hard drive Walter Banks <walter@bytecraft.com> - 2015-09-17 06:24 -0400
                Re: New hard drive Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> - 2015-09-17 11:51 +0000
                Re: New hard drive Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2015-09-17 18:02 +0000
            Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-15 13:12 -0500
              Re: New hard drive Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> - 2015-09-16 22:00 +0000
                Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-17 19:29 -0500
              Re: New hard drive "Kerr Mudd-John" <admin@127.0.0.1> - 2015-09-17 10:29 +0100
                Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-17 19:31 -0500
        Re: New hard drive Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> - 2015-09-15 16:19 +0000
          Re: New hard drive Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2015-09-15 17:48 +0000
          Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-15 13:17 -0500
  Re: New hard drive "Osmium" <r124c4u102@comcast.net> - 2015-09-11 09:28 -0500
    Re: New hard drive scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2015-09-11 14:59 +0000
      Re: New hard drive Dan Espen <despen@verizon.net> - 2015-09-11 11:32 -0400
        Re: New hard drive Bob Eager <news0005@eager.cx> - 2015-09-11 16:06 +0000
        Re: New hard drive scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2015-09-11 16:06 +0000
          Re: New hard drive "Jim Thomas" <JT@nospam.com> - 2015-09-12 05:21 +1000
        Re: New hard drive "Jim Thomas" <JT@nospam.com> - 2015-09-12 05:16 +1000
      Re: New hard drive "Osmium" <r124c4u102@comcast.net> - 2015-09-11 10:42 -0500
        Re: New hard drive scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2015-09-11 16:09 +0000
          Re: New hard drive Dan Espen <despen@verizon.net> - 2015-09-11 12:20 -0400
        Re: New hard drive "Jim Thomas" <JT@nospam.com> - 2015-09-12 05:18 +1000
      Re: New hard drive "Jim Thomas" <JT@nospam.com> - 2015-09-12 05:08 +1000
    Re: New hard drive "Charles Richmond" <numerist@aquaporin4.com> - 2015-09-11 14:34 -0500
      Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-15 05:29 -0500
    Re: New hard drive terry+googleblog@tmk.com - 2015-09-11 16:05 -0700
  Re: New hard drive Walter Banks <walter@bytecraft.com> - 2015-09-11 11:55 -0400
    Re: New hard drive Shadow <Sh@dow.br> - 2015-09-11 14:42 -0300
      Re: New hard drive Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2015-09-11 16:10 -0400
        Re: New hard drive Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2015-09-11 15:07 -0700
          Re: New hard drive sidd@situ.com (sidd) - 2015-09-12 15:34 -0400
            Re: New hard drive Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2015-09-12 12:56 -0700
              Re: New hard drive Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2015-09-12 13:02 -0700
    Re: New hard drive "Charles Richmond" <numerist@aquaporin4.com> - 2015-09-11 14:39 -0500
      Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-14 10:25 -0500
    Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-14 10:22 -0500
      Re: New hard drive Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2015-09-14 13:49 -0400
        Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-14 13:07 -0500
  Re: New hard drive hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com - 2015-09-14 11:10 -0700
    Re: New hard drive philo <philo@privacy.net> - 2015-09-14 14:45 -0500

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