Toward The New Bootdisk Howto, part 5

(A Scratch for The Road 4: kernels 2)

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This is almost a side road of this trip. I started to analyze kernels, but then I realized that it is not possible to talk about kernels without analyzing architectures and virtualization machines. But, it is not a complete side road because this small part of the series was the starting point for thinking toward complementary analysis.

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Analyzing the lists

The first list for analyzing is the list of operating systems.

For a long time I was thinking about how to make some old hardware useful. The first objection to this thought is that one hour of one person who knows well operating systems is much more expensive then one 8086 based computer. However, I don’t think that it is reasonable. If it is possible to make useful a large number of outdated computers and give them to people who are not able to buy a computer, I think that efforts for such aim are valuable.

However, there is one much more important objection. If all humans disappear today, a big majority of computers which they would left wouldn’t be 8086 based computers, but i386 computers. Much more people were and are using computers from 1990s to today then before 1990s. And dominant technology for all of that time was i386.

This means that building a system for i86 architecture is not so reasonable. Actually, it is almost the same as the aim to build a system for PDP-11. So, our primary goal should be compatibility with i386 based computers.

But, at the later stages of the project we should try to build systems for older architectures, too. It will be good to have a possibility to make useful some old computer if it is the only choice in some time, at some place; or to take an important data from some old computer.

At this point it is possible to separate efforts onto three parts:

1. To make a small distributions of contemporary software for contemporary hardware (generation of i386 and newer).
2. To make a small distributions which would make old hardware useful (at least ls, cp, mv… functionality and some scripting or dynamic programming language).
3. To make a small distributions of interesting, but not maintained software anymore.

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Collaboration

You may join the discussion group (which is still not active), as well as you may contact me (millosh@gmail.com).

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Contents:

1. Toward The New Bootdisk Howto, part 1 (The Beginning of The Road)
   
2. Toward The New Bootdisk Howto, part 2 (A Scratch for The Road, part 1)
3. Toward The New Bootdisk Howto, part 3 (A Scratch for The Road, part 2)
4. Toward The New Bootdisk Howto, part 4 (A Scratch for The Road, part 3: kernels 1)
5. Toward The New Bootdisk Howto, part 5 (A Scratch for The Road, part 4: kernels 2)
6. Toward The New Bootdisk Howto, part 6 (Making a GRUB rescue disk)
   

~ by millosh on September 9, 2007.