New Member VERY hot on 8086's

New Member VERY hot on 8086's

[jerryc]

Greetings,

I'm a brand new subscriber and very interested in ELKS. I scanned and 
read the archives for the past year for what seemed relevant to our project.

We have over 100 free self-help programs and want to make them available 
for old 8086's for jails, halfway houses, shelters, rehab centers, and 
many other places where you wouldn't want to put more expensive computers.

We probably only need a subset of ELKS (or Minix, or FreeDOS, or 
whatever we end up using). We mostly want to echo text to an 80 x 25 
text screen. We don't need to print or access any ports. We don't need 
mouse support (mice would probably disappear in these placements, 
anyway, and they're just something else to break). We looked at the 
Minix utilities and libraries, and they do much more than we need.

   http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html#utilities

These machines will be set up as dedicated Inner Peace machines, so 
other functions will not be needed. As you know, there are literally 
warehouses full of 8086's all over the world. Many of them end up in 
landfills because people do not know what to do with them. We have a 
good use for them if we can get it working.

Inner Peace is an expert system program for healing emotional pain and 
limiting beliefs. If you do a Google search on "self-help software" or 
"free self-help" Inner Peace comes up first. We get a lot of hits, and 
are well respected, both in the free software and emotional healing worlds.

While the current version of Inner Peace is written in JavaScript, the 
original alpha was written in DOS Batch. Here's the link to it:

   http://innerpeace.org/ip.bat.htm

There were clearly some problems with it, but it shows us what's 
possible. We'd rewrite the code for whatever OS we end up using for this 
project.

We did plan to do this project with FreeDOS, but feel that using ELKS or 
Minix would help in the promotion of linux, and would rather go that route.

In order to get this working, we will need a good 8086 emulator to run 
on current versions of linux. I read you had an elksemu. Does it work? 
What emus would you recommend.

Any help you could be on this would be appreciated. We can do most of 
the grunt work, but we will need some pointers to get going.

For example, is ELKS a better way to go on this than Minix?

Would stripping out some of the unneeded things make it run faster?

Maybe an even smaller subset of ELKS that does one specific function and 
gets lots of publicity would get more support for ELKS.

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks for your wonderful work, and whatever help you can be on this.

Yours in peace,

Jerry

P.S. Here's the link for the original project. We'll be converting it to 
innerpeace4elks soon, if that's how we end up going.

   http://innerpeace.org/innerpeace4freedos

Re: New Member VERY hot on 8086's

[Alan Cox]

On Sun, 2003-01-12 at 21:07, jerryc@innerpeace.org wrote:
> We did plan to do this project with FreeDOS, but feel that using ELKS or 
> Minix would help in the promotion of linux, and would rather go that route.

FreeDOS is probably the most predictable environment. ELKS might buy you
something if you wanted networking, but due to CPU limitations it can't
buy you anything on the security front really.

> In order to get this working, we will need a good 8086 emulator to run 
> on current versions of linux. I read you had an elksemu. Does it work? 
> What emus would you recommend.

elksemu runs elks binaries on linux - it works. DOSemu will run FreeDOS
or ELKS itself.

> Would stripping out some of the unneeded things make it run faster?

Only if your application needs more space than you have RAM. Otherwise
it is down to the app alone and the compiler you use. ELKS can do
swapping (thanks to Harri) but you've got a whole 400K or so of memory
free to play in - which in text mode is a *lot* of space!

Alan

Re: New Member VERY hot on 8086's

[Dan Olson]

> We have over 100 free self-help programs and want to make them available
> for old 8086's for jails, halfway houses, shelters, rehab centers, and
> many other places where you wouldn't want to put more expensive computers.

That sounds like an interesting project.

> We probably only need a subset of ELKS (or Minix, or FreeDOS, or
> whatever we end up using). We mostly want to echo text to an 80 x 25
> text screen.

I assume everything is local to that computer then?  No serial terminals
off of a main computer or anything like that.  If that's the case, then I
guess you'd just need to make sure that whatever interface you choose is
supported (script, C, PERL, etc).

 We don't need to print or access any ports. We don't need
> mouse support (mice would probably disappear in these placements,
> anyway, and they're just something else to break). We looked at the
> Minix utilities and libraries, and they do much more than we need.

When you mentioned being concerned with hardware damage, is that true of
software too?  I mean, do you need a sort-of "security", not to totally
lock people out of places they shouldn't be, but to at least make it such
that someone with a little computer skill can't trash the system.  I
remember in school floppys were ofter stolen, and in DOS it's easy to type
"format c:".  I *think* ELKS would at least make it a little tougher to
destroy data on a fixed drive.

> These machines will be set up as dedicated Inner Peace machines, so
> other functions will not be needed. As you know, there are literally
> warehouses full of 8086's all over the world. Many of them end up in
> landfills because people do not know what to do with them. We have a
> good use for them if we can get it working.

I almost hate to ask this, but aren't 386s adn 486s just as easly found
for free?  I don't know, I just can't see someone keeping 8086s in
spendy warehouse space for this length of time.  Or do they come from
schools or places that are upgrading to those free 486s?

> We did plan to do this project with FreeDOS, but feel that using ELKS or
> Minix would help in the promotion of linux, and would rather go that route.

I can't fault you there :)

> P.S. Here's the link for the original project. We'll be converting it to
> innerpeace4elks soon, if that's how we end up going.

Let us know what you end up doing.

	Dan

Re: New Member VERY hot on 8086's

[jerryc]

Jerry:
>>We have over 100 free self-help programs and want to make them available
>>for old 8086's for jails, halfway houses, shelters, rehab centers, and
>>many other places where you wouldn't want to put more expensive computers.

Dan:
> That sounds like an interesting project.

Jerry:
Thanks. They're already on the Internet in JavaScript and run on most 
post 1994 gui browsers. We've gotten some good reviews and lots of 
software and self-help sites link to us. If you do a Google search on 
"self-help software" or "free self-help", Inner Peace comes up
first. We'd love any help we can get making this works for 8086's.



J:
>>We probably only need a subset of ELKS (or Minix, or FreeDOS, or
>>whatever we end up using). We mostly want to echo text to an 80 x 25
>>text screen.

D:
> I assume everything is local to that computer then?  No serial terminals
> off of a main computer or anything like that.  If that's the case, then I
> guess you'd just need to make sure that whatever interface you choose is
> supported (script, C, PERL, etc).

J:
All on the local computer, and nothing else on it. Looks like it'll be 
C, maybe with ncurses, that we'll write in, unless something else is 
more compelling.




>>We don't need to print or access any ports. We don't need 
>>mouse support (mice would probably disappear in these placements,
>>anyway, and they're just something else to break). We looked at the
>>Minix utilities and libraries, and they do much more than we need.
> 
> 
> When you mentioned being concerned with hardware damage, is that true of
> software too?  I mean, do you need a sort-of "security", not to totally
> lock people out of places they shouldn't be, but to at least make it such
> that someone with a little computer skill can't trash the system.  I
> remember in school floppys were ofter stolen, and in DOS it's easy to type
> "format c:".  I *think* ELKS would at least make it a little tougher to
> destroy data on a fixed drive.

That's one of the reasons we're looking at ELKS. Under DOS, every user 
has root access. The way we plan this to work, the computer will boot to 
a menu of Inner Peace programs, and that's all the user will ever have 
access to.




>>These machines will be set up as dedicated Inner Peace machines, so
>>other functions will not be needed. As you know, there are literally
>>warehouses full of 8086's all over the world. Many of them end up in
>>landfills because people do not know what to do with them. We have a
>>good use for them if we can get it working.

> I almost hate to ask this, but aren't 386s adn 486s just as easly found
> for free?  I don't know, I just can't see someone keeping 8086s in
> spendy warehouse space for this length of time.  Or do they come from
> schools or places that are upgrading to those free 486s?

I don't know where they come from, but the recyclers we've talked to 
have plenty of uses and call for the 386's and 486's. Even the 286's are 
used for some word processing and science applications. The 8086's are 
also used for some science apps, but they get more of them than they 
have call for. Word is from several different sources of them in 
different parts of the world that they'd love to have a good use for 
them, and that we could have all we could place for what we're planning. 
  Some placements, like some of the big homeless missions, could easily 
be a dozen or more computers, so this could add up.

Re: New Member VERY hot on 8086's

[jerryc]

Jerry:
>>security as these will all be free standing machines. With those 
>>parameters, would you say ELKS would work better than Minix for this?

Alan:
> ELKS is smaller, Minix is a hell of a lot more tested.

Jerry:
I'm assuming smaller is faster running, and maybe faster loading. Since 
we're doing so little, mostly echoing text to the screen, there isn't 
much to test.