[Oberon] USB, bloat, LNO, SCSI/IDE

[Jack Johnson]

On 1/24/06, easlab at absamail.co.za <easlab at absamail.co.za> wrote:
> Q -  are any machines with a BIOS which can boot from a USB-stick,
>  sold yet ?

Even most of our oldest USB-enabled machines will boot from USB flash
drives.  Sometimes it takes a BIOS update, but pick just about any box
with an Intel motherboard, or any Dell box made in the last, oh, six
years or so.

Anything made this century.  ;)

But you're right.  There are a lot of people using a lot of hardware
that still has good life left in it.  Though, the flipside of not
having the USB boot option as part of the standard kernel could mean
that some subset of the users may need to build their own.

I do have a pro-bloat vote for adding PXE support, especially for NO. 
The image is so small, it's a shame to even bother with HD or flash at
all.

> yet  newer Mandrake9 doesn't work, and the 'newest' of the 4: FC1; is
> the slowest, and I don't want to waste time trying to get it running
> LNO.   I think most of the 'getting worse as time progresses' is caused
> by the influence of the art-school graduates ?

I haven't tried LNO, but you should try RHEL or CentOS 4.  Lots of
bloat there, too, but it's easy to scrape off the frosting and I've
been impressed with the performance:

http://www.centos.org/

>  do standard PC mother-boards have a SCSI connection ?

Not typically.  Not like the Macs of old.

But, we have the compilers, and Linux and NetBSD already handled the
bootloaders and disected the hardware.  Someone should tackle a native
port to the old 680x0 Macs and help keep those in use as they start to
age.  I suspect NO on an old Quadra would hum right along, if you
could still scrounge up an ADB 3-button mouse.  I suppose NICs would
be harder to come by if you had a failure.

Maybe it would be more cost-effective over the long haul to just move
to something like this:

http://www.ntavo.com/ntaterminal.php

At $150 USD, w/ 64MB of RAM and Flash storage, I suspect it would run
NO for a lifetime (maybe adding some external storage along the way).

-Jack