21 Oct
2006
21 Oct
'06
3:44 p.m.
Ray Arachelian wrote:
Simple enough. Don't try to build a specialized
device. Reuse normal
hardware and use something like Linux or FreeBSD. It has all that stuff
built in. Support for Ethernet, USB, FireWire, TCP/IP, DHCP, FTP client
and server, HTTP client and server, NFS client and server, Appletalk
server, Samba, FAT-16, FAT32, etc. And the best part is you don't have
to spend 6 months to a couple of years reinventing the wheel just to get
that side of the project going.
There's definitely a lot of merit to that approach. The downside is that at
the interface to the floppy drive(s) there seems to be two possible routes:
1) Use an off-the-shelf catweasel board
2) Build a new board which is totally open (unlike catweasel)
Option 1 suffers from lack of good driver support, documentation, and the
proprietary nature of the system. Option 2 suffers from a total lack of any
hardware interface software (anyone here have experience of writing linux
kernel drivers?)
I'd *love* an 'open source' catweasel board, I really would. But it's
dependent on someone being able to write the necessary kernel-level driver for
the hardware (in a DOS world it's not so bad, but the linux kernel is total
spaghetti whenever I've looked and there's no apparent 'house style' for
how a
kernel driver should work)
cheers
Jules