I’ve been sick for the past two days, and in the throes of fever have ordered myself one of the upgraded iBooks. I’ll report how we get along, currently I’m still trying hard to think of a good name for it. 🙂
iBook G4 12″
Leave a reply
Category Archives: tech
Ed Unofficial 0.1
Slight update. Getting better at this… 😉 Changelog:
- compiled busybox and pure-ftpd with uclibc, saving quite a bit of memory
- some kernel modules included (nfs, nfsd, smbfs, usb-stuff, audio)
- working logging (in /var/messages); /var and /tmp are writeable (tmpfs)
- video output (at least for me) using vesafb
- extended web-server with downloadable dmesg and syslog
Ed Unofficial 0.0
I’ve done a bit of fiddling with the “ed-on-a-chip” release from the SmartXX people. It is an embedded linux “distribution” running from 2mb of flash on the Xbox. Changelog:
- Updated to 2.4.27 + xbox-linux CVS patches + (maybe) proper F & G support
- Updated to busybox 1.00rc3
- Updated to pure-ftpd 1.20
- Updated the initrd image and linuxboot.cfg from Ed on a Chip 0.0.4
- Fixed Makefile autodownload failing with current wget (-c behaviour changed)
- Fiddled about with kernel-settings. Some kernel modules can be made manually; these include USB (input + storage), NFS (server + client) and smb. They are not in the initrd by default due to space restrictions.
RSS Feeds
I’d recommend anyone with a reasonably popular blog software to keep an eye on their comments section. I’ve recently gotten single-link spam entries that are hard to filter out automatically. An RSS-Feed for your comments helps to track these down quickly.
The new iMac…
I’ve always eyed the Apple machines with a certain kind of glee. I think I’d use one more as a Unix workstation than anything else, but they’re nice nonetheless.
The first iMac (with CRT) was definitely ugly, the next one (lamp) was “meh!” but this one is actually tempting (especially that it’s 25dB quiet) — ignoring the abysmal GPU. The middle option configured to my tastes (wireless everything, 512mb RAM) would set me back about €1850 (whereas a comparable, traditional Dell-PC would cost €1750). Maybe they’ll include a proper graphics chip in their upgrade in ~6 months time, and if a financial reevaluation at that time yields positive results, I might actually buy an Apple (probably not as “primary” computer, though).
Server
Ordered (or more accurately made someone else order :P) a server to leave permanently running. If it works out, it may end up being the smallest server ever. Main features are low-power and low-noise (hopefully).
2004-08-30 Update: Via Eden 533mhz with 512mb memory and a 60gb 2.5″ harddisk. It looks like this
Torque
I’ve licensed the Torque engine from GarageGames. It is nicely structured (in C++), includes a complete scripting engine and is multi-platform. The Direct3D renderer is simply and OpenGL wrapper, though (which is what the TSE update seems to be about, but that is in the very early stages) and the terrain only seems to support a single tile.
In any case well worth the $100… Now the only thing left is to actually make a game with it! 😉