In message <[email protected]>, James Richard Tyrer writes: > > BTW: The support to transfer the BOOT image to the EV box is only > > needed if you can provide also back-channel communication for HID (at > > least keyboard), which can be used to configure the BIOS, editing via > > GRUB loader, resolving root mount point issues with certain initrd.. > > Wouldn't the keyboard and mouse be on the PC. If using X, you would be > connecting to a remote X server. There is no need for a hardware > connection to the X server for the keyboard and mouse.
The X server (ethervideo box) needs a keyboard and mouse. You want a keyboard and mouse to be near the display, not on the other end of the building (or in theory on the other side of the world). The whole point of using Ethernet is to allow locating the hot noisy computer away from the display/keyboard/mouse. > > Otherwise nobody needs to know about the PC's boot, if he/she can do > > nothing about it and has to go to the console. > > > It is necessary to configure the PC motherboard although this is > becoming less and less necessary. If the boot fails (which happens all too often) you need the console to recover. > >>> BTW: is it possible for the X box to open a new window when some > >>> PC boots up and display its console? > >> > >> Basically, no. It would have to start X for this to happen. Since > >> the boot mode uses only the VGA BIOS routines to directly access > >> the hardware this wouldn't work. > > > > Hey, that is bad concept! Why you want to run a video-transfer driver > > and on top of that the X, if you can run the X directly on the > > target? > > > I presume that you didn't mean running both of them at the same time. > Well, that is the common way of doing it: > > 1. The BIOS communicates with the console using the VGA BIOS calls > > 2. After the OS boots, it communicates with the console using the > console driver. How does this "console driver" communicate with the actual hardware? Probably varies from one OS to the next. > 3. After the OS startup is complete, X is started. What do you mean by "X is started". With this setup we wouldn't run an X server on the computer, it would run on the ethervideo box. Some users will probably want xdm(1). Others might want something else. > > So if the box runs the X server, the BIOS extension will contain a X > > client (assuming underlying networking is up and running) and then > > you can pop up a boot image on the target device. Using X protocol. > > > I hadn't thought of that, but yes that might work. You would also need > a console driver for step #2. Actually, if this would work, it sounds > like a good idea. There are issues: > > What would you do to run OSes other than *NIX variants? My understanding is that Plan-9 folks don't especially like X11. Since we are FLOSS I guess they can port their preferred windowing system. Has VMS been ported to x86/amd64 machines? As mentioned previously we need support for FreeDOS. > >> You can't run X (communicate with an X terminal) until after you > >> boot the OS and start X or an X compatible thin client system. > > > > The EV will implement an X server if it has a processor. It is an old > > technology, so today you should be able to implement it using a 8 > > bit microcontroller :) > > > But, you need to have a client running on the PC. The firmware on the VGA-BIOS-to-X11-Ethernet card translates VGA calls into X11 calls. So the firmware is an X11 client. _______________________________________________ Open-hardware-ethervideo mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-hardware-ethervideo
