Re: [pc110] Linux on PC110

Alan Cox (alan nospam at diamondage.cymru.net)
Mon, 23 Jun 1997 18:13:05 +0100 (BST)

> including their xdvi counterparts. No gcc though, but this becomes
> possible along with a lot of other stuff using Hitachi's just-announced
> 30MB compactflash, looking forward to getting one of these (anyone know
> of a source?). However what I currently do about gcc and other stuff

Anyone know what the price will be like. The flash cards I've seen are
positively painfully priced. I still have using flash as a disk write buffer
and PCMCIA IDE tidy ups (to do smart drive spinup/down) on my list of things
to do.

A 15 or 30Mb disk cache and write cache would materially reduce the disk
time and I'd hope power usage.

Has anyone tried a PC110 with the belt of batteries stuff people sell for
Camcorder overusers ? I may need between 2 days and a weeks worth of power
for a sojourn to Scotland later in the year.(*)

(*) Yes they do have electricity in Scotland but not all the places I will
be!

> Just like any 486SX-33, i.e. no floating point and compiling the kernel
> takes an hour or more. About a third to a half the speed of a
> Libretto.

The main things the SX shows up with Ive found are font scaling (I've turned
it off), and rsynth. I do assorted compiling on the PC110 - its often been
building a new kernel while I walk home for example.

> How does X work with the small screen?
>
> No worse than Win95. I'm fairly shortsighted (around +3.5 diopters,
> i.e. needing correction of -3.5), for which a comfortable viewing
> distance is 9", making the 4.7" screen equivalent to 9.4" at the more
> normal viewing distance of 18". You can get the same effect with
> strong reading glasses.

X is fine, while the screen is small the pixel resolution is very good and
the display extremely sharp.

> >Linux, FreeBSD, and such are much happier if you issue the command
> >"PS2 _ nospam at ATA PRIMARY" to tell the PC110's BIOS that an ATA card should be
>
> I might try this for a second try at installing Solaris on a 340MB
> drive---no luck first time I tried it, and I have no idea how one

I found it simpler to just swap the boot order to be hda/hdc (ie flash first)
and lilo the boot block of the flash drive. This has some big advantages most
notably the machine boots and boots into DOS/personaware just fine with no
hard disk inserted.

Alan