I'm sure he could coax at least a few more hours out of it by somehow finding a working 1x CD-ROM drive to boot a LiveCD from.
I've got one in my basement but getting a working 8 bit scsi interface might be harder.
Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot Ubuntu
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot Ubuntu
#12this is an amazing hack. Well done for this guy, and his totally useless project.
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Re: Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot Ubuntu
#13As I said earlier, he needs to run jslinux on this stack. It will be like `computing slowmo @ 1Mfps`
Re: Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot Ubuntu
#14What's really impressive, is that it still work somehow...
Re: Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot Ubuntu
#15The best part about this is the battery pack in the picture. I wonder if there's a niche for the equivalent of the Model 100 in today's world? http://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/trs-80-computer-line/model-1... A fully mobile general purpose computer with instant boot, impressive battery life, running off 4 AA's. The Wikireader comes close as the modern equivalent. The input method would have to be something like Siri, w…
I have a working model 102 on the Shelf Of Dreams here at work.
Re: Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot Ubuntu
#16The linked blog post misses the interesting bits. Yes, it boots Ubuntu (slowly) via an ARM emulator written for AVR. That's just software. What struck me is that he wrote a controller for an 8 bit FPM DRAM bus instead of just using a big SRAM. That's surprising, and not at all trivial to do over a bunch of GPIO pins.
Yeah, that is actually a pretty awesome bit of engineering. I would never have thought of this, and it is exceptionally clever in some exciting hacker way.
Re: Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot Ubuntu
#17Impressive. And now I'm wondering if a Minecraft inside Minecraft would actually be realizable. As 8bit CPUs have already been made (altough with unknown architecture), it is a bit less crazy to imagine running linux with a java stack on it. It will be hellish slow and you probably need some sort of "hardware" graphic acceleration. And a lot more memory than the current versions. But hey, running Minecraft in Minecraft would be pure brainmelting awesomeness!
Maybe some sort of Hardware Description Language to Minecraft compiler would be useful.
Re: Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot Ubuntu
#18These crazy projects are the most fun. As Richard Feynman notoriously said: "What I cannot create, I do not understand".
shameless plug below:
Last year, inspired by Bellard's jslinux, I too wrote an emulator that can run Linux on the browser. Only I was lazy and emulated the vastly easier LatticeMico32 processor.
Anyways, the result was very intellectually satisfying.
After writing the interpreter, I went ahead and wrote a version that generates Javascript code on the fly (and captures up to 3 backwards jumps to the same block), for massive speed ups.
Anyways, it doesn't serve any purposes, but boy was it fun...
The code is at: https://github.com/ubercomp/jslm32/
And there's a demo running on: http://www.ubercomp.com/jslm32/src/
BEWARE: It only works well on Chrome (takes download time + 10s to boot on my machine).
If anyone is interested in this stuff, just ask and I'll write a post describing what I did to take boot time from 2.5 minutes to 10 seconds.
Re: Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot Ubuntu
#19These crazy projects are the most fun. As Richard Feynman notoriously said: "What I cannot create, I do not understand". shameless plug below: Last year, inspired by Bellard's jslinux, I too wrote an emulator that can run Linux on the browser. Only I was lazy and emulated the vastly easier LatticeMico32 processor. Anyways, the result was very intellectually satisfying. After writing the interpreter, I went ahead and…
Very cool! FYI, it also works fine in Firefox.
Re: Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot Ubuntu
#20Impressive. And now I'm wondering if a Minecraft inside Minecraft would actually be realizable. As 8bit CPUs have already been made (altough with unknown architecture), it is a bit less crazy to imagine running linux with a java stack on it. It will be hellish slow and you probably need some sort of "hardware" graphic acceleration. And a lot more memory than the current versions. But hey, running Minecraft in Minecra…
How about Conway's Life in Conway's Life? (Yo, dawg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q... )