From: Steve.Yelvington@launchpad.unc.edu (Steve Yelvington) Subject: Re: Can you port Linux to my Refrigerator? Date: 8 Sep 1993 18:11:43 GMT
In article <QUINLAN.93Sep8132001@rose.cs.bucknell.edu> quinlan@spectrum.cs.bucknell.edu writes:
>
>This "port Linux to everything thing phenomenon" is rather silly. Why
>on Earth would you want to port it to anything nobody uses anymore? I
>don't want to know how slow any Unix would run on my Commodore 128
>(yes I still have a working one). I know that we aren't all made of
>gold, but 386's are dirt cheap these days.
>
In principle, I like the idea of free Unix running on any hardware capable
of supporting it.
The original questioner asked about the Atari ST/TT/Falcon line, not about
a Commodore 128 (or a refrigerator). The ST -- which has a 68000 and no
MMU -- is out of the question, but the TT030 and Falcon aren't. In terms
of CPU horsepower, they're comparable to the '386.
But you're right to question whether it's worth the effort. The TT030 is
no longer in production, as far as I know, and Atari didn't sell very many
of them in the first place. The Falcon is nice -- 68030, Motorola DSP chip
and all that -- but Atari stupidly made it a 16-mHz machine instead of a
32-mHz machine and priced it above the current retail for a '486 box. Not
surprisingly, it isn't selling well.
So the best advice for any Atari users who are interested in Linux is to
pick up a cheap used '386 box, stuff it full of memory, and hack away. Use
your Atari as a VT100 if you like, or just keep it around for running DTP
or Midi stuff.
Or, if you really must stick to the Atari, you can run Minix or fake it
with MiNT and a Unix shell.