Re: No Debian/MIPS (was: More Linux/SGI status) (fwd)
Hi,
Michael Neuffer forwarded this to me ...
On Sat, Oct 18, 1997 at 08:40:39AM +0200, Michael Neuffer wrote:
> Subject: Re: No Debian/MIPS (was: More Linux/SGI status) (fwd)
>
> From: Michael Neuffer <neuffer@trudi.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE>
> > What you are saying here is complete nonsense.
>
> Consider where I am, what I do for a living, and who I might know,
> please.
>
> Unfortunately, Olivetti systems don't seem to be available to me,
The Olivetti machines are Mips OEM products. I guess that it is quite
unlikely that you can get one of the Olivetti machines in the US. Instead
try to get a Mips Magnum 4000 or a Millenium. Those are the same machines,
just original from Mips. You can often get them for free and they at
about P100 speed, much faster for heavy floating point.
> and it's unlikely I can get an old Indigo or other SGI system since
> my employer has taken to selling off equipment in commercial markets
> before it loses all of its value. Since you are so much better connected
> with the MIPS Linux project, can you please write the appropriate people
> for me, and ask them about these two systems:
>
> DECStation 3100 (r3000)
> DECStation 5000/200 (r4000)
>
> I would be happy to place these systems under the care of an interested
> developer once there is some chance that they can boot Linux.
The Linux support for the MIPS based DEC machines is still not useable,
mostly due to lack of hardware documentation for the machines. However
there is a good number of different types of MIPS machines out there that
can be used to run Linux on. Many of them are more or less similar to a
PC like the Magnum and porting the kernel to one of them is a relativly
easy thing to do.
Btw, Mike told me some people were saying nobody'd have a MIPS system and
Mips'd be dead anyway. Not true at all. The MIPS semiconductor producers
(Mips only designs CPUs but doesn't own fabs) will ship about 30.000.000
CPUs this year, that's more than any other RISC CPU, just like last year.
It may be true that most of those CPUs are not going into "real" computer
systems but embedded systems of all kind. So if people consider Linux/i386
to be the opponent of NT, then Linux/MIPS is the opponent to Windows CE.
And we have a true opportunity to spit Evil Bill in his soup because in
the embedded market the fees per copy of the OS are very important.
Windows CE is charged per copy. Linux per CDROM, if at all. And the
feature list makes Linux look quite well for many embedded applications.
Ralf
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