I have been monitoring this email list for a long time.
This serial console talk has prompted me to share my
embedded Linux fun.
I have a headless Linux machine. It is an embedded
386sx33 from Advantech. Woo - Woo 386 I know, but
it's just a toy for me to play with Linux in a fashion that
I may use it someday. ( plus it was a freebee left over from
a project many years ago that was headed for the trash
bin )
As you can guess I'm not running x-windows! The
performance is actually not bad. Small programs compile
fairly quickly. Of course if I do a kernel compile, I kick it
off and go to bed... :-)
My setup has no keyboard nor video card. The cpu is
in a custom two slot per side passive AT backplane ( two
slots wide, but 4 slots total ). This is so it can fit in a 3"
tall 17" rack mount - backplane positioned vertically. The
only other card in there is a ne2000 clone ethernet card. I
believe that it is running slackware 2.0.27 if memory serves.
I bought a small footprint power supply for $8 from bgmicro.
The whole thing would fit in a shoebox.
I can telnet and ftp to it from either my os/2 warp
connect machine or my windoze 98 machine. This
works just fine.
I did make the serial console patch to see the kernel
messages. It compiled fine, but I never got it to work.
Things were working fine otherwise so I didn't spend
much time on figuring this out. Perhaps this serial port
contention is the reason.
Other than an embedded machine, other thoughts
for use of this machine: remove hard disk, install
etherboot rom in ne2000 card, for a diskless unit.
Put this unit in small-small enclosure and have it
as lan print server for my home network. Perhaps
a sansdisk would be a better solution so don't
need to have a tftp server.
I also have more serious projects in mind. Mostly
for a data logging project that I orginally developed
a prototype running OS/2. 1) OS/2 is not free,
2) OS/2 is picky about having a video card ( at
least I haven't discovered a way around this ),
3) I wanted to learn something about unix and
Linux, 4) I don't have the source code for OS/2
in case I design a custom cpu card for my
project.
One thing of interest that I did was "clone" my
Linux hard drive. I didn't seem to find how to
do this in any how-to, just bits and pieces. I
wrote down how to do this procedure style in
case I forgot it. If anyone is interested I can
post this ( if I can find it anyway :-)
For now this is just a hobby for me. I would be
interested hearing what others have done.
Scott
