Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I still think it is very cursed to see that image of RMS using that laptop despite I was shocked to see it 12 years ago. Still shocks me to this day.by stevefan1999
- what is shocking about it?by em-bee
- It’s tough to find them on eBay; I wonder what the right search terms are?by shrubble
- I think they're super uncommon in the west.
I think they're also super useless, to be honest. Incredibly slow. Linux support continued to degrade the entire time I owned mine. The keyboard and display are far too small to be usable. The graphics chip accelerates basically nothing.
I sold mine [1] on eBay back in October. I hope the new owner enjoys it more than I did :)
by mattst88 - The wsconscfg problem with multiple screens, whatever it exactly is, is decidedly odd. According to this, the display is being driven as smfb0 in what is largely a dumb framebuffer mode, no acceleration, no GPU, no fancy high jinks whatsoever. wscons/wsdisplay should have no difficulty with multiple screens on that sort of thing.by JdeBP
- I don't think these machines achieved much popularity in China either, as standard PCs were far more common and compatible with the existing software base.
the keyboard and trackpad are internally PS/2.
Interesting that the PC influence is still there, although I'm pretty sure a MIPS doesn't have them on port 60h/64h, or indeed any I/O ports. I remember having a similar moment of surprise when I played around with an ARM VM and discovered it had a "VGA-compatible" GPU emulating an old ISA-class chip.
by userbinator - > I'm pretty sure a MIPS doesn't have them on port 60h/64h, or indeed any I/O ports.
Funnily enough, it does. They're just sitting behind a AMD CS5536 PCI-to-ISA bridge.
https://man.openbsd.org/man4/loongson/glxpcib.4
...
> glxpcib0 at pci0 dev 14 function 0 "AMD CS5536 ISA" rev 0x03: rev 3, 32-bit 3579545Hz timer, watchdog, gpio, i2c
> isa0 at glxpcib0
> pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60/5 irq 1 irq 12
> pckbd0 at pckbc0 (kbd slot)
> wskbd0 at pckbd0: console keyboard, using wsdisplay0
> pms0 at pckbc0 (aux slot)
> wsmouse0 at pms0 mux 0
> mcclock0 at isa0 port 0x70/2: mc146818 or compatible
...
Other machines, such as the DEC Alpha were similar.
by brynet - (author) My understanding is that they're wired into the AMD southbridge which provides them over memory mapped I/O.
- A decade’s worth of SGI machines combined MIPS processors with PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports.by justin66
- > or indeed any I/O ports.
PCI has the concept of I/O ports even if the CPU doesn't. The details differ depending on whether it's PCI or PCIe, but the net effect is that whatever's responsible for putting the access on the bus exposes an MMIO window that corresponds to the the port addresses available, and generates port I/O cycles in response to accesses to that window.
by mjg59 - For those curious about the Godson–dog food connection, the Chinese code name was 狗剩 gǒu shèng 'scraps for the dog'.by sandbach
- No computer is obsolete with a BSD. I still use an n270 netbook daily.by anthk
- Acer aspire one with NetBSDby iberator
- I still have my NetBSD-running MSI Wind around somewhere...by bitwize
- Same here. I have a Samsung NC10 netbook with that same CPU which I recently converted from Debian to NetBSD when they dropped 32-bit support.by Narishma
- The NetSurf browser the author tried out has multiple frontends. Two run on OpenBSD that I know of, the “default” GTK frontend and an SDL‐based framebuffer frontend. As was pointed out, GTK has a rather sizeable number of dependencies; building the framebuffer frontend instead would save a lot of time.by bentley
- (author) Is there a way to specifically build the framebuffer version from the ports tree? I didn't see one.
- Mainline Dillo runs faster and smoother, it's just an fltk + git clone && configure +make install away.by anthk
- "However, I can find no evidence that Richard Stallman had/has a dog, or indeed any pet."
According to his own disclosures, he has a fear of dogs
https://web.archive.org/web/20120119135147if_/https://secure...
- That link says he's okay with dogs unless they bark angrily or jump up at people.by n4r9
- "Dogs that bark angrily and/or jump up on me frighten me, unless they are small and cannot reach much above my knees."
No fear of small dogs
- His long list of conditions is an interesting read. It comes off as arrogant in places, but I guess if you really travel a lot and have unusual requirements it's best for everyone to be upfront about it!by cl3misch