aard

aard, 1 year ago

A good starting point for a wikipedia rabbit hole covering the software aspects on how to drive a display: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86_Modeline

aard, 1 year ago

I’ve been a Linux user since the 90s, and nvidia has been a problem as long as I can remember. The wayland issues are just a new chapter in a long saga. ATI used to be the same, but they came around after having been bought by AMD.

If you’re already planning to use Linux on something a quick search will directly tell you that nvidia is a problem. If you got the hardware before nvidia that sucks - but again, it’s nvidias fault.

I think we absolutely should neglect nvidias market share, and just fully drop support for nvidia cards - either they’ll get pressured by angry users to no longer behave like dicks, or they keep doing it, and people will only make the mistake of buying nvidia once (or not use Linux) - either way, we’ll have gotten rid of a massive headache.

aard, 1 year ago

That has changed over the last few years - I’d prefer a proper usb3 to sata bridge over a shitty sata controller - and the quality of integrated sata controllers isn’t that great nowadays.

aard, 1 year ago

After reading about it - true. Disadvantage of doing this stuff for a long time - you miss new developments. Only reason I’m aware of testdisk is that I lost the sources of my own superblock search tool, my old binaries broke with a newer glibc, and before reimplementing it I checked if sombody else had done that in a more usable form in the meantime.

aard, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I’d just start from very simple kernel and static init, and work my way up to adding more functionality. I’d use kvm with rootfs on p9fs - that allows playing with it without having to build images. I can throw together the initial invocation, if you’re interested.

Then start building simple core elements in a language allowing easy static linking - I’d use C with dietlibc or go. Start adding core userland programs, explore initramfs (without using something like dracut), add dynamic libraries and explore the dynamic linker, … - if you’re interested we could set up a matrix channel for questions (typically with some lag, though), and do a github repo to follow along.

LFS iirc goes for full desktop - the high level userland is very complex, but easy to understand when you know the basics. You pretty much learn how to compile lots of libraries - which has limited use. A full LFS style desktop I’d no longer recommend nowadays - it’s just too many dependencies to deal with. I used to build my own system (not following LFS) until the Xorg fork made it sigificantly more complicated - and things got just worse since then, and I never was using a complicated UI stack.

edit: I had a few minutes, so I’ve thrown this together github.com/bwachter/lll - you should easily get a kernel with a custom init running, and have enough to start experimenting. If you or anyone else is interested to go deeper I’ll set up a matrix channel for guidance.

aard, 1 year ago

A Siemens S55. After that I moved to a Treo 270, and stayed with Palm until Nokia gave me an N900

aard, 1 year ago

It did, but note that the linked picture is the full resolution of the camera. Also, the phone had very limited storage space, and the display was in no way suitable for displaying the pictures taken, so you just hoped for the best until you managed to check them on your computer.

The S55 got lost eventually, but the camera module should still be around here somewhere.

aard, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, but x86 was relatively cheap. Alpha and Itanium were in a similar price range.

At that time Alpha belonged to Compaq - and they stopped Alpha development (and canned quite a few good designs which were pretty much ready to go), expecting they’ll be able to replace it with Itanium.