Text 12643, 88 rader
Skriven 2009-04-30 19:00:34 av Maurice Kinal (1:261/38)
     Kommentar till en text av Bo Simonsen
Ärende: the lion sleeps tonight
===============================
Hey Bo!

> So you're aiming at 12V DC home? :)

That would be too impractical and expensive at this point in time.  I am
thinking more along the line of what would be practical and desirable in
situations where the 'grid' is what is one makes it in places where there is no
grid.  In those situations DC power from batteries is the only practical
solution,  Most often batteries are recharged with gas driven generators or the
generators power whatever equipment is needed. In the case of computers, DC
would be the way to go but then the power source would need a longer life than
what is supplied by things like laptops where you'd be lucky to get more than a
couple hours usage between charges.  I am shooting for at least 12 hours
usuage.  I have a small 486 that can run for days but it lacks regular output
(ie monitor) at the moment.  It made an excellent router/bbs/???? on the lan
here. I also have a network switch that runs off pure DC.  Both of these will
easily run for days on a fully charged 12VDC marine battery.

> But it's definitely the future

The past too.  This has been done this way for ages now.  Think about emergency
power for hospitals for example.

> (A windmill park is soon opening here which will serve 200.000
> households, so this is difinitely interesting!)

For sure.  They've been experimenting with tidal electrical generation on the
Island here for a number of years.  Wind power generation would be more
practical on the west side of the Island where the population isn't dense
enough to make that attractive or at least not economical.

> Maybe it was Maximus? I really gave up in porting it so it was 100%
> unix style.

Understood.  To successfully pull that off it needed a entire rewrite. Too much
difference between DOS/OS2 and any unix enviroment.  Most of Maximus does for
DOS/OS2 isn't needed in Linux.

> It's about the architecture of a generic program library.. We have
> some fine ideas imho. :)

I am definetly interested.

> So you have some helper applications written in C

Not at the moment.  It is currently all bash scripts that feed enviroment
variables to source to ensure that the desired result happens, potentially
useful for cross compiling or targetting more generic applications than
autodetection schemes allow for.  For instance I am currently using a x86_64
xeon to target 486 class machines.  Doing this means that I can successfully
build an entire enviroment for a 486 in less than an hour as opposed to the
days that would take doing the exact same thing on a 486. I still build a gcc
and friends for 486's so that they can take care of themselves but that is only
because I may need them to take care of themselves when there is no other
recourse.  This idea has proved itself useful more than just a few times.

> I wrote a small mailer in Python.

I've done that in Perl.  At present I don't require pythin but need perl for
source like glibc.  I don't want nor need anymore stinkin' scriptors!!! 
Besides too much broken and needed modules in python wrt x86_64 or at least for
pure 64-bit x86_64.  I avoid python ... as well as writing anymore perl scripts
as often my targets don't have that optiion, such as ttylinux, and thus bash
scripts are the winner even when perl is onboard.  I already ditched anything
needing python even if it works, which it often doesn't.

> I think it sounds like an interesting project, most of all to prove
> the power of shell script, but also to get somekind of reusable
> components, which one could use when maintaining a BBS system.

I agree 100%.  I may revive the WeBeBashing Project one of these days. However
I am currently distacted with the idea of a working ttylinux developemnt system
using busybox's applications to replace the usual suspects.  So far I am really
close to pulling it off but I still need the regular gawk instead of busybox's
awk.  I seem to recall a simular problem with Debian's awk and your porting of
Maximus ages ago. Funny how things come back to haunt every so often eh?

I just finished a i386 ttylinux development thingy and am going to see if it
can replicate the usb flash disk packages I posted a cuple days ago. I had a
problem with packaging I think is resolved now so I thought I'd make it more
difficult just to see if I can pull it off.  So far so good. Still need gawk
though.

Life is good,
Maurice

--- BBBS/LiI v4.01 Flag
 * Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)