Re: Help Wanted!

[David Given <dg@cowlark.com>]

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On Tuesday 27 September 2005 20:10, Isaque Galdino wrote:
> Well guys, I appreciate your efforts to bring elks back to life.
> I tried once to use elks in my hp200lx but with no luck at all.
> hp200lx still has a lot of users, if you could boot a hp200lx with
> elks I guess you would have a lot of guys trying elks for sure.

Have you tried ELKS' arch-rival, Minix? I'm not sure if Minix 2 will run on 
the i86, but Minix 1.5 certainly does, and works reasonably well.

The big trouble with ELKS is that it only really runs on i86 machines, and 
these are a right pain to deal with --- it's not just that they're really 
old, decrepit machines which cost more in electricity to run than a pocket 
calculator a thousand times more powerful does today, it's that no two are 
the same. Standards were pretty fuzzy in those days, and there's a huge 
variety of different kinds of hardware that needs supporting. Actually making 
ELKS work reliably would be a rather large undertaking just for test 
purposes...

(DOS gets away with it because, basically, DOS is crap. It relies on the BIOS 
to do a lot of the work, which ELKS can't really do. Minix manages a bit 
better but it's a bit picky on the kinds of hardware it'll support for just 
this reason.)

Can ELKS be ported to *other* architectures that i86? Would it be feasible to 
use it on a modern, flat architecture like ARM?

-- 
+- David Given --McQ-+ "Hydrogen fusion, the sun makes shine
|  dg@cowlark.com    | Vascular pressure makes the ivy twine.
| (dg@tao-group.com) | Because of Rayleigh, the sky's so blue.
+- www.cowlark.com --+ Hormonal fixation is why I love you." --- Zarf


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