You are
making life difficult if to don't have a tool for reading
PDF files. I think you can buy a nice one for a few hundred
dollars.
You can buy a used PC for tens of dollars.
Including the monitor and the license fees for all the necessary bits
of software? And including someone to be its sysadmin? I'm certainly
not about to baby along a machine running closed-source software.
And inclduing somebody to maintain the hardware? I sure as hell am not
going to try to maintain any machine that doesn't have full schematics
available, and I do not intend to try reverse-engineering a modern PC
that's full of undocumented ASICs in BGA packages that I can't probe the
connections of.
You like open-soruce software. So do I (well, having the source available
is enough, even if it's not open in the FSF sense [1]). I also want my
hardware to be as well docuemtned.
[1] For example, I bought (second hand) the HP71 IDS manuals. Volume 3 is a
complete commented source of the system ROM. It's not 'open' in the FSF
sense, in that it's copyrighted by HP and you can reproduce it, or sell
products containing it, or... but I do have the source code to hand if I
want to understand how something works, or where a system variable is
stored, or...
-tony
