Re: Mobile Pro 880 Successes with 4.0

[jscottkasten%yahoo.com@localhost]

--- On Tue, 2/17/09, Ben Hodgens <ben%hodgens.net@localhost> wrote:

> > Choice of CF card makes a big difference too.  Some
> have horrible performance.
> 
> This is a decently fast card. I don't have any
> benchmarks available for it, but I picked it specifically
> for its speed reviews. (Don't have it available at the
> moment to check, but I digress.) At any rate, CF is going to
> be slower than RAM any day. It wasn't so slow that it
> was unusable (better than heavy desktop swapping, TBH),
> it's just that it was constant and slightly noticeable -
> just enough to be an irritation.

Yes, vim-gtk2 thrashes a little more than I would like, and that's purely a 
memory and bloat issue.

> If you do give pmax a try, I would be very interested in
> hearing whether or not you run into the same (or similar)
> build oddities I did. (I was 100% fresh to NetBSD and pkgsrc
> at the time of my attempt, and had to grab the assistance of
> several someones in #netbsd on Freenode, if I recall
> correctly.)

If I do trod down that path, I'll certainly keep you posted.  Right now, I am 
really curious to explore cross build for pkgsrc with some direction towards 
seeing if a bulk build could actually be made to work.

I did run into one single C++ file that wasn't done after an entire week under 
GXEMUL.  I don't think it crashed or anything, but was actually taking that 
long to do.  I've seen a few C++ files that took an entire day to do, but 
eventually passed using the emulator.

> > I did something like that way back in the Agenda VR3
> days before I finally had a good cross build system working.
> 
> Ouch! Didn't the VR3 have something like 8M RAM and a
> 60MHz MIPS processor?

YES!  It was 66MHz actually.  You can still get those things from Softfield in 
Canada, and the production units they sell actually have 16MB of RAM instead of 
the 8 that was in the developer units.
 
> There are a number of (Strong)ARM (PXA) based systems out
> there from 2000-2004 period which are very appealing, still:
> decent keyboards, good battery life/low power, minimalist
> hardware/solid-state, and a portable/small profile. The
> PSION Teklogix Netbook Pro is an additional example.
> Unfortunately, unlike the Jornadas which received so much
> attention, most of these devices have... tenuous *BSD or
> Linux support. In the case of the MP900 and netbook Pro,
> I've been unable to determine whether there actually is
> sufficient hardware support to pick one up off Ebay. :-/

I actually do have an old Zaurus 5500 that I play with sometimes.  You hit it 
right on the head... The state of development and support is a real issue for 
so many of the ARM devices.  Most of those running Linux are stuck back at an 
ancient 2.4 kernel, although I have seen some recent attempts and moderate 
success at bringing 2.6 to the 5500.  Many have no *BSD support at all.

> Hopefully we'll see these devices remade in a new
> generation. (No, those klunky, hot x86 Eees don't
> qualify - though the Vaio P comes closer.)

Agreed.  :)

Actually, in the vein, have you, or anyone else here looked at the Skytone 
ALPHA-400?  It's based on an interesting Chinese MIPS SOC CPU.  It's 366MHz, 
128MB RAM, and various sizes of on board flash from 1 - 4 GB.  They include an 
SD slot and lots of USB ports.  You have a choice of Linux 2.4 or WinCE 
apparently.  Whats also interesting is that this MIPS processor has SIMD 
extensions and they have what appears to be a proprietary full screen video 
player app for it that takes advantage of the HW accelerators.

Plug Skytone ALPHA-400 into wikipedia and follow the links at the bottom.  I've 
seen them on eBay for about $130 or so.

Cheers,

-S-