Re: HP9000/425e support at Open Source unConference 2014 Kagawa

[Izumi Tsutsui <tsutsui%ceres.dti.ne.jp@localhost>]

abs@ wrote:

> I wonder what the performance of rdesktop or tightvncviewer would be
> on some of those m68k machines? A possibly cute thing to do would be
> have a little amd64 NetBSD box in the corner running xen with a
> selection of Windows VMs and have a vnc viewer on the demo machines
> "Oh, can this x68k box run Windows? Well, here is Win7, and here is
> XP, and here is Vista, and...'

There was also a booth of the "Opencocon" project at the conference.
The Opencocon is a Linux based distribution optimized for Thin clients:
 http://opencocon.org/about-cocon
 https://twitter.com/shimadah/status/439237546912935936/photo/1
 (the picture is a booth of the opencocon at OSC 2014 Tokyo)

The target machines of the opencocon are Windows 9x generation x86 PCs.
For example, it can show the Win 8.1 panel on the Toshiba Libretto 50:
 https://twitter.com/shimadah/status/453539099417133056/photo/1
The Libretto has Pentium 75MHz CPU, 32MB RAM, and 24bpp graphics.

On the other hand, most m68k machines are >5 year older than
such Win 9x generation machines.  Most m68k machines have
~25MHz CPU, 8-64MB RAM, and only 1, 4 or 8bpp graphics
(except some 060 monsters).

On such machines even starting only Xserver is heavy enough.
(It could cause thrashing to move mouse cursor on 12MB X68030)
Furthermore, there are few X11 applications that supports less
than 8 bpp graphics (Modern GTK2 apps have some trouble even on 8bpp).

That's the reason why mlterm-fb with sixel graphics is useful
for demonstration of my m68k machines on these events.

> (When demoing X on a sparc 1 I always found xkobo a nice game to show,
> I wonder if an '030 or '040 would be fast enough...)

For 1 bpp or 4 bpp machines, pkgsrc/games/xmris and pkgsrc/x11/xearth
are also good to show. Xeyes is also fun for children.

If you can prepare any presentation slides, it's also fun to show
"a machine playing presentation itself": 
 http://movapic.com/pic/201104161105244da8f96468241
 http://www.ceres.dti.ne.jp/tsutsui/osc2010kobe/img00.html
This is "making of SMC_TT Ethernet" presentation on TT030 itself
at OSC Kansai Kobe.

However, Twitter client is still a good demonstration because
it's easy to prepare (no contents are necessary if the machine can
run a client application), all visitors can see what it's running,
and they can also see their own tweets on the demonstrated machine.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NytIaugKA8M

Anyway, demonstration at these events is a good motivation
to build and test various applications on these vintage machines.

Many NetBSD kernel geeks often satisfy if their kernel reaches
upto multiuser prompt (or even just it prints kernel copyright message),
but on the events more visible and amazing applications are required
because the operating system is an implicit software for ordinary users.

Actually PRs pkg/47941, pkg/pkg/48608, and pkg/48672 etc. were
found on preparing binaries for the demonstrations.
We are calling it "the event deadline driven development." ;-)

---
Izumi Tsutsui