Computer history is a hobby of mine. You might like this: http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/linux-history.html I went through the archives and picked out posts I found interesting from the first

I do note that this is inexcusable. The kernel _DID_ once run in 2 megabytes of ram, and 4 should still be a realistic goal for a tiny linux project of the busybox/toybox plus uClibc userspace kind. (

Linux in under 2 megabytes of RAM, even when running from ROM, is not a realistic goal. For context: linux 0.0.1 was developed on a 4 megabyte system in 1991. Swap support was added in december of tha

Oh, wow, really? I missed that. And probably wouldn't have put anything on it if I'd known. I use Creative Commons myself. All I know about the FDL is numerous people warning me away from it as a horr

Dunno. Vladimir was using my mipsel target on a TV and my binaries would run on the TV but existing binaries would die with "illegal instruction" in my environment under QEMU, I haven't actually poked

The patent lawsuit against lexra scaring off half their customer base probably didn't help matters: http://landley.net/notes-2009.html#14-12-2009 But I don't claim to be a mips expert, and have nothin

I note my old rant about a "hello world" kernel: http://www.mentby.com/rob-landley/what-happened-to-linux-tiny.html Stripping down the Linux kernel by removing stuff is a red queen's race, running to

I admit I'm mostly responding to a single phrase from your first message, and then your defense of that phrase. You said: And saying "oh the competition can't possibly catch up with this huge advance

No, you are not preaching to the converted. Underestimating the ability to adapt a specific instruction set to take advantage of manufacturing improvements is something you'd think people would grow o

Welcome to the 1980's, Luke. Here's your MIPS system. Welcome to the 1990's. Here's your copy of OS/2 for the PowerPC "Pineapple". Welcome to the 2000's. Here's your StrongARM. Rob

... Another question that got raised during the Q&A and which I didn't manage to competently answer during the talk: "Why not just use a Wiki"? Wikis are great ways of accumulating a slush pile, but t

CELF was a lot of fun. I'm sad to hear it's ceased to exist as an independent entity. I'm also sorry the largest bureaucracy in the Linux world has decided that it needs to own embedded Linux as well

Your own FAQ says this is _explicitly_ unsupported: http://www.denx.de/wiki/view/DULG/CanUBootBeConfiguredSuchThatItCanBeStartedInRAM Rob

Does this relocation support mean we can configure the sucker to _not_ try to initialize the dram controller, and thus run under QEMU? Rob

It's hard to tell with both the Nexus and a couple days hanging out with the current BusyBox maintainer both in the running, but I suspect this is the most useful thing I got out of CELF: http://tree.

Everyone who attended Chris DiBona's closing keynote at CELF yesterday got a free unlocked Nexus. (Apparently he's like Oprah, only with Linux.) Rob

No rush. I am actually interested in demoing my FWL build system, but I'm just one random geek (not bringing a staff) and I would like to see some of the panels... Thanks, Rob

How long does the demo run for? (What times will somebody need to be there to staff a booth?) Rob

There's a shortage of todo items? Somebody needs to make a kernel filesystem that can read-only loopback mount a zip file. (Yay squashfs, but we've had a compressed archive format you can easily get i

I had a second round of projects to propose to CELF after I thought about it a bit. (I have such a long todo list I don't even remember things like this unless I dig a bit.) Another one was getting uC