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

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On 26 April 2014 18:01, Izumi Tsutsui <tsutsui%ceres.dti.ne.jp@localhost> wrote:
> abs@ wrote:
>
>> I wonder how feasible it would be to have rdesktop or a vnc client
>> write directly to a wsfb() type framebuffer, or even via SDL to the
>> same. Might make an '040 just about usable for a remote display.
>> Certainly if I was able to use a 4MB 15Mhz 68020 based sun/50 as an X
>> terminal we must be able to manage *something* :)
>
> The problem is both NetBSD kernel and Xorg server are
> quite larger and require more CPU power than 1990's binaries.
> IIRC NetBSD/sun3 1.1 kernel was only ~700KB, but in 6.1 it's
> larger than 2MB.
>
> IIRC there is a wsfb driver for mplayer on x86, but I'm not sure
> how much CPU power is required.

If we can cut the X server out of the loop then I would hope it would
be just about be fast enough for a demo. Probably not fast enough to
be usable as a real device (unless someone wanted to prove a point :)

>> Random thought - how much extra load would a twitter bot take? Each
>> machine could have its own twitter account and respond to certain
>> commands - uptime, df, uname, first part of dmesg. For bonus (and very
>> very very slow) option could even tweet a bitmap for dmesg :-p
>
> The problem is the load of authentication via SSL.
> Posting a tweet takes ~10 minutes on 68030 25MHz LUNA
> via pkgsrc/net/ruby-tw. (though I have not tried it recently)

Ouch. It should be possible to setup squid on a local machine to proxy
http through to https for twitter. Providing no modification is
required to the client (apart from ensuing it supports a standard
proxy setup) then its arguably not even cheating :)

> Most of my recent projects (Atari SMC_TT, hp300 wscons,
> resurrection of luna68k and LUNA-II support, x86 liveimage, and
> mlterm-fb etc) were driven by the events like Open Source Conference
> and Kansai Open Source, as seen in the event page :-)

I wonder if it might also be worth posting updates to a vintage
computing list - I'm pretty sure there are people who would love to
hear their beloved m68k CPUs are still on show :)