[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: meeting?



On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 03:41:07AM -0700, Brian Morris wrote:
> On 8/9/07, Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've been wondering whether it might be nice to hold some real-life
> > meeting someplace. Stuff I'd like to do:
> >
> > * Meet face-to-face with you all (haven't done that yet, ever).
> > * Discuss upon a strategy to get m68k to be actively supported within
> >   Debian again.
> > * Swap some hardware (I stil have some machines that aren't doing
> >   anything useful these days, which is a shame).
> > * Help eachother with getting stuff to work where necessary (say,
> >   coldfire boards etc).
> > * Hack together on stuff
> > * ... something else?
> >
> > Thoughts?
> >
> 
> not everybody lives in europe (I myself live in SanFrancisco,
> some body lives in Australia I guess).

But I think most m68k hackers are in Europe. I wouldn't mind a meeting in
SF, but I am not going to take my m68k boxes back to the US...

> some people have never seen an atari or an amiga m68k.
> (I wouldn't mind seeing one of those or a next or a sun again)

I bought my Falcon and my Mac on eb*y, and many Amigas are listed there
also. I think you can even buy "new" Amigas. Or look at the pictures here:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/index.php?mode=viewforum&forum_id=12

> I am pretty sure I am stuck on the macs. (but I would like to
> see a coldfire some time and i actually might give some
> cash for one)

I thought I had some pictures of the coldfire, but it is just a PCB, a very
small PCB. And blue :-) 

> a)
> I think it would be interesting to have some sort of autonomous
> program that would just run and evolve itself. I guess there
> are some issues about entropy. you have to feed it some data.
> one advantage of old 68k is they are low power, although slow
> of course, the 605 is I think about 25 watt.  my powerbooks are also
> pretty low power but they do get hot after a few hours.

Low power? Not when I look at my electricity bill. I think the powersupply
in my Amiga is rated for 120W, maybe more? The Quadra840 is probably in the
same range, the Falcon has a 200W ATX supply but I hope it uses a lot less.
My server is what I consider low power, it runs on a 60W brick. And the
efika board, I read the CPU uses 1W, the RAM 2W, add a little for video and
harddisk, maybe the total is under 25W. And a 400MHz PPC, or 800MHz VIA CPU
can do quite a bit more than even my fastest 68k machine. If you want a low
power board, the Efika is available for 99$ I think, just add a video card
and a harddisk and you have a nice silent machine.

> b)
> I think it would be nice to have some (debian) email server. for me particularly
> where I could buy an account for a small fee or donate (to) an old computer for
> the mail server (because of free wireless here = no ISP). we have an
> experiment going here of colocation = non-commercial server farms.
> but I suspect they would not like one of my old computers ... (even the ppc)

You can rent Xen hosts for a couple $ a month, but I thought this would be
overkill just to get a static IP. What I would like to have is what one of
the first dyndns services provided, you had to actively announce your IP
every couple of minutes, otherwise your domain would link to an unroutable
IP. Current dyndns change the IP they register for you only when the machine
is online, but if you DSL goes down, they don't care, they point to the IP
that now somebody else may be using. I like the first solution better, I
don't want my buildd email to be sent to other people.
 
> not everyone has (official) debian accounts nor necessarily wants them
> 
> I think I am happiest to build at least half my system from tarball
> etc downloaded
> >from other sources. debian too big, or too formal or something. i want to
> build scientific systems more so than industrial and much more so than
> commercial
> consumer ones.
> 
> --------
> 
> there's a new version of dillo in sid. Its still broken (not just on 68k).
> upstream builds ok.
> (if you config it correctly).

You could submit a patch in a bugreport, so all Debian users would benefit?
Rebuilding many packages from scratch on m68k is a waste of time IMHO.

Christian



Reply to: