Re: [Somewhat OT] What your non-OVMS machines run?

From: Roger Ivie (rivie_at_ridgenet.net)
Date: 07/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 16:05:00 GMT

On 2004-07-29, Undisclosed <nomail@dontbeaweaselspammer.com> wrote:
> personal ones or ones you administer for non-work purposes, of course,
> since it would be a little cheesy to ask about work machines.
>
> I'm using fairly cheap ( I deliberately bought less than the state of
> the art) but well constructed x86 based machines multibooting variously
> between Win XP, various Linux distros, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.

My wife gets the good machine; I run the old crap no one wants anymore.
My main machine is now the machine her best friend gave up on because it
was too slow. I run NetBSD on it.

I also have a beige G3 on which I run MacOS. I used to run NetBSD on it,
until the wife bought a firewire camcorder and suddenly wanted to be
able to run iMovie.

My main VMS machine is a Sandpiper I got surplus for $25. I also have a
VAXstation 4000/96 for running VMS, although it also ran as an
unofficial corporate webserver using NetBSD for about a year at a PPOE.

I like NetBSD for a couple of reasons:

  - It runs on things that aren't PCs, and I have plenty of those.

  - It is highly configurable in a manner that Linux and FreeBSD aren't.

    My previous PC was my wife's old box; something in the IDE
    controller died in a manner that made it incapable of running
    Windows (for some reason, the IDE controller could no longer do
    DMA). I was able to configure NetBSD around the problem by simply
    telling it to ignore that PCI IDE controller and use it as if it
    were an ISA one.

    I tried both FreeBSD and Linux on the machine, but they both
    discovered the PCI IDE controller and keeled over because they
    tried to use the broken DMA. The machine ran NetBSD 24x7 for a
    couple of years with a broken IDE controller.

I have an 8" SSSD CP/M box right here. And my Epson PX-8, although I
need to run through it and change all the batteries... 

-- 
Roger Ivie
rivie@ridgenet.net
http://anachronda.webhop.org/
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