BSD and HP9K700 standalones . . . ?

[Richmond Mathewson]

On 17/01/2010 20:12, J. Landman Gay wrote:
> Richmond Mathewson wrote:
>
>> Personally, I'm extremely 'turned on' by this bit:
>>
>> "Nine popular UNIX/X11 platforms are also supported: Solaris SPARC, 
>> Solaris x86, DEC Alpha, SGI IRIS, HP-9000/700, IBM RS/6000, SCO ODT, 
>> BSD UNIX, Linux Intel, and LinuxPPC."
>>
>> most of those options have become Boojums with RunRev; i.e. they have 
>> softly and silently
>> vanished away.
>>
>> which is an awful shame
>
> We need a show of hands of how many people actually would use those 
> platforms. Last count, almost zero, except for Linux -- which is the 
> variant the team chose to continue to support. The time and effort to 
> produce engines optimized for each 'nix variant can't be justified by 
> the tiny or non-existent number of people likely to use them. The 2.1 
> engines were made for MetaCard by Dr. Raney. There were almost no 
> takers for those platforms even back then, and now that Linux is the 
> most popular, there are virtually none. Personally I'm very happy that 
> the engineers are working on the engines that most people use.
>
>>
>> NOW . . . the big and burning question has to be . . . How many of 
>> the features implemented
>> after RR 2.2.1 will function in builds made with 'Mortal Engines' ?
>
> Anything implemented in later engines will of course fail in older 
> ones. I'm surprised you had to ask.
>
I had to ask because, before I owned RunRev Studio 4 I had to rely on 
stacks made with Dreamcard 2.6.1;
and on the rare occasions I needed a build I used RunRev 2.0.1 - and all 
the stuff I used in 2.6.1 worked
its way into the 2.0.1 builds very successfully - as I never really 
bothered to track which components were
advances from 2.0.1 to 2.6.1 I had no way of knowing whether the fact 
was that with 2.6.1 I was only using features that pre-existed in 2.0.1 
or the 2.0.1 standalone builder was magically coping with 2.6.1 features.

This was especially confusing because shortly after I acquired 2.6.1 and 
built a standalone with 2.0.1 it
downloaded new versions of the engines.

The previous reply to my posting that revolves around SGI IRIS computers 
rotting in cupboards is quite
informative to my mind.

As you can see, somebody else is interested in something to do with HP 
9000 series 700 machines.

I myself, have a large number of computers rotting in my attic in 
Scotland (about 5 Performa 52xx
Macs) which are perfectly serviceable, except for the fact that it would 
be JOLLY NICE to leverage
features implemented in RunRevs 3.5 and 4 on Mac OS 8.1 . . .  I am 
seriously tempted to cart them
to Bulgaria this coming summer (when I will be driving to Scotland and 
back) as I may be moving into
bigger school premises where I could easily accommodate 5 or 6 machines. 
I also have been offered
the opportunity to get my hands on a half-dozen G3 slot-loading iMacs 
that are being 'deprecated' at
an educational institution in Scotland - they will cope with Mac OS X 
10.4.9 but will run far more
efficiently on 9.1.

And I am quite sure that I am not the only "retro nutter" out there.

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"Fooling around" with Metacard and engines is not to everybody's taste 
or abilities, and I, personally
entirely agree with what you say about:

"The time and effort to produce engines optimized for each 'nix variant 
can't be justified by the tiny or non-existent number of people likely 
to use them."

and I am really just playing the devil's advocate because somebody was 
asking about BSD builds and I thought
it might be 'fun' to see what could be done in that direction . . .

http://www.freebsd.org/

certainly doesn't look as if it is going to disappear up its own WXYZ 
any time soon.

So, I have written directly to RunRev (see earlier posting) to ask if 
they would be so kind as to issue
2.2.1 and engines with licence numbers to any Studio and Enterprise 
owners who might be interested;

I don't see quite how they would object . . .  :)

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My own interest lies in the direction of Linux PPC as am wondering 
whether it is not a good
idea to run Ubuntu PPC:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCDownloads

on G3 iMacs rather than Mac OS 9  (I have had a PPC macMini running 
Ubuntu PPC 8.0.4 for quite
some time, but got cheesed-off when I realised I was unable to author 
standalones to run on it).

Now while a lot of engines that work really dandily with Metacard are 
available at:

http://www.hot.com.my/metacard/

I cannot see one for Linux PPC.

As the stuff I have authored for educational use was largely composed on 
RunRev 2.2.1 for Linux
a version of 2.2.1 that had access to Linux PPC would either 'solve my 
problem' or rapidly
disabuse me of any illusions I might be suffering from . . . :)