[In response to an off-list question] Yep ... my initial thought is more for the LinuxBIOS Demo Distro ... ok long version;
I want a distribution DEMO that can be put into the BIOS space in the 8Mbyte DoC .. so that there is an entire binary "package" that any numb-nut can download from the net, for their working LinuxBIOS mainboard. The hard part has been trying to find a good demo app ... so I have picked Seti@Home ... http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ I learnt all I know (almost) from here; http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/faq.html SETI has been around for ages ... the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence ... old idea .. but quite processor expensive ... so the guys toyed with the idea of making a windows screen saver that would log into the SETI computers, download a chunk of radio data, and scan it for "interesting" signals ... The project has been so successful that a recent article (in some linux mag I bought) said that the world's largest computer (the SETI@Home cluster) is now processing more data per day, than is available ... Ie ... the radio telescope doesn't collect enough data to feed off to the SETI network ... So HP have decided to throw in some more Multiplexors, and the SETI guys are looking at widening up the radio range and/or grabbing data from the southern hemisphere .. in order to make more data :-) The cool thing for us is that this is all free and borne of love like Linux itself ... and it is tremendously popular (obviously, from the size of the supercluster it makes). .. and it is small ... the project releases i386 and i686 linux binaries (I checked it out this evening) .. which are command-line only ... I should be able to fit a generic i386 linux SETI@Home package inside a DoC Millenium for LinuxBIOS without any problems ... all we need to do is find something interesting to put on the screen :-) All demo units should be auto- set to connect back to SETI as the LinuxBIOS "user" ... SETI@Home for Unix Platforms; http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/unix.html Note that on the Unix Links; http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/links.html#links_unix .. there is an X-SETI, but its nothing more than statistics; http://www.nccn.net/~gc_kumon/xseti/dethist.gif This is just a "project" that I'd like to build and throw onto the LinuxBIOS site to help demo the project (and even contribute to something wider - if people really don't value their old processors). It should be a good test, because it really *uses* the processor, and it has a go at the network, but doesn't require a screen (not more than a serial console) - certainly no VGA. I got more serious about the GA-5AX this arvo/evening ... and finally have a working, serial-console-only 2.4.17 kernel booting from hda into RedHat 7.1 ... all of which was much harder than it should have been ... because the .config generated on my AMD 1800+ is set out as an i686 which crashed the poor old AMD K6-II-300 in the first second or two after kernel load (into mem) ... so my config is now hard set at i386 to avoid sillyness. I will build the SETI-BIOS distro as root initrd and make code/binaries available to LinuxBIOS as I go ... but my bigger interest is getting, what should be, this _easy_ board running ...
