hi,
im looking for Unix/Unix-like/Linux friendly hardware(desks,laps,phones,etc) free of proprietary software or compatible with free software(OS,BIOS firmware,etc) something that is easy to replace stock or something that cames with free software preinstalled and that i can replace them if i want to.
i've seen some lists that contain vendors that are Unix/Linux friendly and also the hardware endorsed by FSF which seem to be Lenovo thinkpads,etc the thing is it seems most of hardware require external flashing to replace BIOS,etc and makes the task harder..
my question are,
what are the bests Unix/Unix-like/Linux friendly hardware manufacturers?
which hardware is the best to make a computer 100% free (free BIOS and OS) and that is optimized and behave better under Unix/Unix-like/Linux based OS's?
Thank you.
--
PHACT Phreakers / Hackers / Anarchists / Cyberpunks / Technologists
Back when the dinosaurs were using card readers (and yes, I've used a card
reader on Unix; I think it was a desktop CDC model, and the driver would
handle two modes: strict 80-column i.e. one 12-bit column per 16-bit word
and you got 80 of 'em on a DMA channel, or ASCII NL-terminated after last
non-blank column, and no, I have no idea whether it handled EBCDIC or CDC
etc, but I digress as usual).
Where was I? Oh yes, sleeps...
Back when sleep(3) was sleep(2) (yes, Virginia, sleep() used to be a
system call, then it became alarm()/pause(), and now it seems to be
nanosleep(), and I'm wandering again), you never called sleep(1) because
its granularity was +/-1 second (and all the way up to +infinity,
actually, on a really busy machine), thus it could return right away, with
ensuing hilarity.
So, I'm curious:
When did sleep(2) become sleep(3)? Was it V7, or some BSD? Or Babbage
help me, SysVile?
When did the caveat about sleeping for 1 second become known? I don't
think that I ever saw it documented, but was one of those "lore" things
passed around at Unix conferences and the like.
And when did it start using nanosleep() instead of alarm()/pause()? I see
that my Penguin box has a bet both ways; it "may" use SIGALRM[a] (thus
"mixing calls to alarm(2) and sleep() is a bad idea" (well, I've used
both), and also refers to nanosleep().
[a]
Alpine's spell-checker suggested "SICKROOM" here; pretty close when
dealing with timed-out reads on a TTY connection[ii] :-)
[ii]
Have you tried this with Perl? You can't rely on EINTR[3], so you have to
use eval{} blocks instead, and it starts getting pretty fugly...
[3]
And here it suggested "ENTREE".
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
>Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2018 13:54:32 -0500
>From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
>To: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com>
>Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
>Subject: Re: [TUHS] Sleep()y musings
>Message-ID:
> <CABH=_VTO7sdgGypp3U7zQoWdJ3HsGUUjrk->6_Rf5VE5gyNGD7g(a)mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
>...
>VAX also has a Time-of-Year Clock Register (colloquially called the
>TOY clock), a 32-bit unsigned value whose LSB represents a resolution
>of 10 milliseconds (0.01 second). All VAX models except the
>VAX-11/730 provided battery backup for the TOY clock so that it
>continued to operate even when the system was powered off. A VAX can
>thus be powered off for about 497 days and still remember the
>date/time.
Also in AlphaServers we still have this TOY, the clock and the battery that is.
>From a DS10 running Digital Unix 4.0G, /var/adm/messages file, I only
removed the BEL characters
Dec 12 03:01:27 br0011 vmunix: You must reset the system time manually
Dec 12 03:01:27 br0011 vmunix: Time of year (TOY) clock returned zero
as the current time
Dec 12 03:01:27 br0011 vmunix:
Dec 12 03:01:27 br0011 vmunix:
Dec 12 03:01:27 br0011 vmunix: WARNING: preposterous time in TOY clock
-- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!!
Dec 12 03:01:27 br0011 vmunix:
Dec 12 03:01:27 br0011 vmunix: i2c: Server Management Hardware Present
Dec 12 03:01:27 br0011 vmunix: datalink: links=128, macs=6
Dec 12 03:01:27 br0011 vmunix: NOTE: dxb_configure: Configure values:
dxb, ffffffffffffff9d, ffffffff90bfbf80, ffffffff90bf9a20
Dec 12 03:01:27 br0011 vmunix: WARNING: dxb_configure:
configure_driver error = 22
Dec 12 03:01:28 br0011 vmunix: Node ID is 00-10-64-30-ae-38 (from device tu0)
Dec 12 03:01:28 br0011 vmunix: WARNING: Time of year (TOY) clock
battery is dead, time and NVR contents ignored
Dec 12 03:01:28 br0011 vmunix:
Dec 12 03:01:28 br0011 vmunix: You must reset the system time manually
Cheers,
uncle rubl
> From: Dave Horsfall
> When did sleep(2) become sleep(3)? Was it V7, or some BSD?
Before V7. The MIT system (~PWB1) says, on the man page for sleep (II), "As of
this writing the system call is still available although the C routine
implmeneting the function uses 'alarm' and 'pause' (II). It will be withdrawn
when convenient."
Probably left the system call there for compiled commands, etc which used it?
Noel
> > But the concept of email goes way back.
> Indeed, it does, but only on the same system.
Very far back. CTSS had a mail utility.
If communication within one system is not
recognized as email, then the exchange that
opened in Boston in 1877 was not a
telephone system.
Doug
We lost Ray Tomlinson on this day in 2016; known as the inventor of email,
he sent the first message between two hosts on the ARPAnet (prior to that
the users had to be on the same host), and pioneered the use of the "@"
sign.
In the meantime, some tosser (his name is not important) is claiming that
he invented email first; I recall that APL\360 had a "mailbox" facility,
but it certainly didn't use "@".
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
I hadn't realized that groff hyphenation had been taken from
Tex, not troff. Is that becuase Tex did a better job, or
because troff's was deemed proprietary?
A new paper comparing Unix kernel designs was published earlier today:
Stergios Papadimitriou and Lefteris Moussiades
Mac OS versus FreeBSD: A Comparative Evaluation
[IEEE] Computer 52(2), 44--53, February 2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2018.1451648
Despite the title, GNU/Linux also is included in the comparisons. The
abstract is:
>> ...
>> FreeBSD (an open source Unix-like OS) and Apple's Mac OS use similar
>> BSD functionality but take different approaches. FreeBSD implements a
>> traditional compact monolithic Unix kernel, whereas Mac OS builds the
>> BSD Unix functionality on top of the Mach microkernel. The authors
>> provide an in-depth technical investigation of both approaches.
>> ...
Our fellow list member Larry McVoy, and his lmbench suite, are
mentioned in the article, along with results of that suite.
There are about 200 numbers in the two large tables of performance
measurements, and while many are comparable across operating systems,
there are some benchmarks that show up to a 40x difference between
systems on the same hardware.
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