Reading about the Commodore 1541 now...one of the odd things about the 1541 was that it wasn't a block device, like a PC floppy or a SCSI drive, it was actually a very simple network-attached storage device. You interacted with it by using file names.
The good news: I went out and bought an 802.11ac router today, and it works great on my phone (the one device I have so far that supports ac).
The bad news: I still can't get anything faster than 65 Mbit/s on my lappy, even on the new router, and even though the wireless card has two antennas.
The ugly news:
It turns out the speeds promised for 802.11n are a total fucking scam. To get 150, 300, or 450 Mbit/s, you have to use something called "pair bonding", something that only works if your card and router support it, and which is not a good idea at all on 2.4 GHz because there are no non-overlapping channels that aren't in use in most places.
Few 802.11n cards support the less-crowded 5 GHz band; even if the driver settings say it's supported, the radio may not be so cooperative.
Without both 5 GHz support and pair bonding, your maximum speed with one antenna is a brisk 72 Mbit/s. It's hardly worth upgrading from g in that case.
The only way to guarantee 5 GHz support is to get an 802.11ac card, but the damn things are like hen's teeth! The only Mini-PCIe cards I can find are Intel, and cards for desktop machines with regular PCIe are very expensive for consumer cards; they start at around $50 and go up from there. I get the distinct sense ac is still not quite done outside of mobile and embedded applications. :P
Still, it's not a total waste; I can move things around so the Verizon router does only b/g and the new one does n/ac, so that throughput will be higher.
Okay, I found one other device that supports 5 GHz: The TP-LINK 11n card in my media server/client bridge PC. Looks like I'll want to get a second one of those (or possibly an 11ac-to-USB 3.0 card) for Mom's machine.
Oh, and NetBSD needs an NPX as well. Bollocks. I have a 486DX-33 on order now. :P
However, the network card works quite well, and I've managed to get the sound working too (though not so much the AWE part yet, as I don't have any games that support it natively).
ISA PnP was weird, man. It was essentially a backport of EISA auto-configuration (it even used the same IDs), but with the added step of including the available config options in the card's PnP ROM (something neither EISA nor MCA did; you had to have the setup disks for every card in your system there).
Also, it seems those damn NiCd and NiMH clock batteries a lot of 1990s PCs used are no longer made. They went the way of the dodo when PCI machines switched en masse to the CR2032 sometime around 1995 (it took Apple a bit longer, but then, they'd been using half-AA lithium batteries since the 1980s). I bring this up because my 486 uses one (and miraculously, it still works and isn't leaking), but I do want to replace it with something less dangerous.
Also, I borrowed the ROM burner and UV eraser from work (we haven't used either in years), and got the XTIDE AT BIOS going on the 486. It can now boot off of a 20 GB hard disk formatted with FAT32.
I got the 486DX, but for some reason it's not stable at 33 MHz. Trying to do much of anything makes it crash. It works fine at 25 MHz, though...wondering if enabling 33 MHz also forces on the external cache (that isn't there).
Also, I found out who PB's contract builder for these machines was after all these years...it was Tatung.
Okay, crazy idea of the day: Take the 120 GB out of the G4, put it in the 486, then use the 160GB for Mac OS and Linux split 50/50 (80 GB is more than enough for either). 120 GB is far more than I'm ever likely to use on the 486, even with FreeBSD installed, but it's worth it to have a drive that doesn't whine.
My first day in my first job after college, I was given a 486 box (one of the PCs made by Intel in their very brief foray into providing whole systems), a disk containing a virus, a clean MS-DOS boot disk, a copy of the 486 Handbook from Intel, a copy of the MS-DOS Encyclopedia, and told to work out what it does.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I know Linux still has some issues as a desktop OS, but I see these point-by-point complaint files and tend to write them off as "You obviously want to run Windows 7 or OS X instead, so go do that! Quit yer bitchin' and go do something else."
The author seems particularly angry about 3d graphics and SMB networking support. If he needs both of those to work perfectly, then suck it up and pay the $140 for a Windows license. You're never going to be happy with Linux or any other Unix.
Or my mom, for that matter. She's tech-savvy, but used enough to having certain applications around (most of which are Windows-exclusive) that Windows 7 is really the best choice for her.
Also....if there's one sentiment in that article I do agree with, it's that the thrill is gone. There was a time when Windows was horribly unstable, about as secure as a screen door, and Microsoft seemed to care not a whit about it now that they'd seen off Netscape. That time was the late 1990s and early 2000s, the bad old days of Windows 98 and Windows XP RTM. Microsoft's seeming disregard for their product drove a lot of people to support free alternatives, and Linux and the BSDs gained a lot of advocates in those eras. It also helped that the Mac was essentially dead until 1998 and not terribly interesting again until about 2001 or so, and a lot of its advocates at least tested the waters while Apple re-invented itself.
But now? Windows improved to the point that it doesn't crash unless a bogus driver or bad hardware is doing it (the switch to NT helped a lot there), security has improved greatly, Bill Gates is off giving all his money away, and Steve Ballmer just bought the Lakers. Microsoft is much harder to hate now. The Mac is still expensive, but presents a level of polish that's still quite attractive to people. And that's made it so that Linux on the desktop only appeals to a few people who still remember how broken things were around 1995 and haven't noticed that 20 years have gone by without much progress, or to people like me who actually kind of like GNOME 3. :o
It's not so much the OS that needs it as applications like games and certain types of graphics software. I think the author may be judging X's OpenGL support solely on what's implemented in Mesa (which is definitely something of a laggard); Nvidia and AMD provide their own OpenGL libraries which are usually better.
SMB is Server Message Block, the protocol that underlies Windows file sharing. I believe it dates back to IBM's NetBIOS networking stuff from the 1980s, but the Windows implementation is considered canonical now. Linux distros (and OS X, though I don't know if that's still true) use a free software package called Samba to access SMB servers. It works well, though until Samba 4 came out recently, it was roughly on NT 4's level of functionality (Samba 4 finally has a proper Active Directory implementation, and it's even been vetted by MS's interop people).
the Clippers, not the Lakers, though oddly enough the past couple years the Clippers have been the better team as Kobe's gotten old and injured, though this is a minor point
As for Linux on the desktop, I currently use a Windows laptop and I have my older laptop running Linux without X, and ssh into the latter from the former for lots of things. The math department has both Linux and Windows desktops and I prefer the former because I can ssh easier.
Oh, right, I couldn't remember so I just guessed. :|
I really do think that the author doesn't see personal computers as general-purpose devices; he sees them as akin to IBM 3270s or DEC VT-100s, defined, reliable user interfaces linking into much larger, more complex systems (that just happen to be running locally in most cases these days). Not having a rock-solid specification and sticking to it irks him badly.
I do think he's completely right that Linux as-a-whole is really arrogant about breaking stuff constantly. They care even less about breaking backwards compatibility than Apple does, and Apple is pretty bad about it, because they want you buying new stuff all the time.
I do think he's completely right that Linux as-a-whole is really arrogant about breaking stuff constantly. They care even less about breaking backwards compatibility than Apple does, and Apple is pretty bad about it, because they want you buying new stuff all the time.
That and the whole "it's not for you, maaaan" attitude some developers have. I've seen so many OSS people devolve into rolling on the floor tantrums crying about "YOU FUCKING WINDOWS LUSERS ARE SPOILING MY FUN" when you ask them to do simple things like, say, have a consistent interface that isn't reminiscent of a Sun-3 circa 1990, or (shock horror) write decent documentation.
To many people, Linux isn't a serious OS, it's a tinkerer's playground akin to Unix PWB, and will never be ready for prime time because it's not supposed to be. Thankfully, the distros reel most of this childishness in, but they can only do so much.
And really, if you dislike writing software that faces end users, then why bother? There's always things like kernel hacking or working on systems like microcontrollers or things like that. Anything but the public tantrums and shade-throwing.
NetBSD is installed, but for some reason the boot blocks won't boot from my 120 GB. The same drive boots the exact same NetBSD install just fine on the Athlon machine (which has BIOS that's not freaking beta-quality). I can try again with a different drive that's been set up to fit /boot into the lower 500 MB, but it's looking like I may have to abandon this exercise for now and use a SCSI drive and controller. -_-
I have an Adaptec 1542 and a 50 GB Seagate on order now. I already have a couple of 68-pin cables, and I have a 50-68 converter someplace, so hooking things up shouldn't be hard.
Well, I made some progress while the parts are on the way: NetBSD will boot if I give it the entire hard disk. This probably means something is wrong with the Maxtor's partition table. I'm looking forward to the SCSI drive anyway, since it should be faster; this thing's motherboard IDE seems to be paddleboard IDE connected to the ISA bus, not local-bus IDE that can do advanced PIO or MWDMA modes.
I notice that X doesn't support this thing's video card. Probably not surprising; XFree86 4 dropped support for several older cards, and X11R7 dropped support for even more (the argument being that any older card worth using would have a working VESA BIOS...and this one doesn't :P). I may need to find and patch the last version of XFree86 with the video7 driver to get a display on this thing, unless I want to go looking for an ATI or Tseng video card...
Support for the Video 7 chipset is provided by the XF86_SVGA server with the video7 driver. The status of this support is unknown because we don't have any recent test reports, and this driver has no maintainer.
4.0:
No native support for these chipsets, because the old driver has not been ported.
Summary:
No Video 7 chips are supported in 4.0.
In short, FUCK. I guess I'll have to get and install 3.3.6 if I want to use the onboard video. X.X
The 486 I have is from 1993. My Athlon board is from 2003. It's clocked nearly 80 times higher, runs integer instructions something like 130 times faster, and supports a lot more memory. It's interesting to see how far we came in just 10 years.
It's 3.5 times faster just on one thread! (nbench can't test all 8 threads).
Also note that the performance jump over the next 9 years has not been anywhere near as dramatic. There's a reason why everything is multi-core now, and it's because we're getting to the point where we can't make the transistors any smaller...
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I need to get an SA account at some point
But I'm a spoiled brat who refuses to buy my own because I deserve to have people give me things
Well, shit. My new video card got here, and it works, but it seems like newer versions of X don't support ISA video cards at all. They have to be local-bus or PCI, or the drivers just aren't interested....or at least the Cirrus Logic driver isn't. :P
I guess I have to spend the beaucoup bucks on an ATI or Tseng card. It's either that, or get a second 486 with PCI to run NetBSD on. :P
Okay, the only fucking driver that still supports ISA is the goddamn TRIDENT driver, for some reason. ATI cuts off at the Mach64, Cirrus cuts off at the 5430, and Tseng cuts off at the W32p (which was never available in ISA).
Okay, fuck this shit. If you want a 486 PCI board these days, you either have to pay a lot of money, or you have to import one from the Ukraine AS-IS. I'm not risking $50 on a board that might not work.
I think it's time to start considering Socket 5 and 7 boards.
As for the Packard Bell, I think it'll be happiest in Win95 OSR2. FreeDOS has a number of weird bugs regarding the floppy drive that are driving me nuts, and if I want to run other OSes, I'd have to run versions of them from the late 1990s/early 2000s anyhow (damn XFree86 dropping support for things), so I may as well run what would have been this thing's most practical OS. (Win98 would probably be too much for it, or that's what Microsoft's specs say, anyhow.)
Comments
Also, I found out who PB's contract builder for these machines was after all these years...it was Tatung.
and what is SMB other than a famous NES game
Windows file sharing as in things like sharing files over LAN (i.e. the "Network" location)?
*tokes one*
But I'm a spoiled brat who refuses to buy my own because I deserve to have people give me things