Hi,
I've kept a bare-bone Olivetti M700-10 around for a while, collecting dust,
but finally I bought some RAM, borrowed a floppy drive etc. and tried to
boot MILO on it. I followed the instructions in the Linux/MIPS HOWTO, and
MILO identified it just fine as far as I could see. As the M700-10 is listed
in the Linux/MIPS FAQ as supported this shouldn't be too surprising I guess,
but it was encouraging anyway :-)
I understand there is a mailing list at fnet.fr? Is linux-mips@fnet.fr
the mailing list itself? In the following I'm assuming that it is, I hope
this is ok.. (I've been on the vger list for a long time, but there is no
activity there.)
What I would like to do with my Olivetti is to eventually use it as a
home workstation, hopefully with an ISDN connection or something to where
I work. Until I can do that I'll keep it at work where I can do cross-
compiling and possibly use the network for NFS etc.
From the FAQ I understand that the on-board SCSI and Ethernet adapters
are not yet supported. I have an old SCSI disk which I once used in my
Linux PC (ext2 file system on it), and the Olivetti diagnostic program found
it and ran a successful test on it. But if the adapter doesn't work yet I'll
have to wait with that one I guess.
What I do have that may work is an ISA NE2000 based Ethernet adapter,
twisted pair, no jumpers (software configured). Could this one be used?
The FAQ indicates that it can, but without jumpers I'm not sure (I have no
experience with NE2000 boards).
I have experimented with a Sparc IPC running SparcLinux and mounting
everything over NFS, so something similar is what I had in mind for the
NE2000 board with the M700-10.
I'm also thinking about setting up a cross-development environment on an
SGI Challenge running Irix 5.3 (got some disk space there). Are there any
problems with cross-compiling for little-endian on a big-endian system?
I guess it is no problem these days, but I remember a time when it used
to be..
I'll just go ahead I guess, and then I will know soon enough :-)
(I've picked up diffs for binutils and gcc, and some more stuff, from the
ftp directory.)
As the M700-10 is an EISA machine there are a few things I'm uncertain
about. According to the manual every board has to be configured in, even
ISA boards. The manual indicates that there should be a configuration
program (SD.EXE) on one of the system diskettes. What I have for this
machine is one diagnostic diskette and three user diskettes. The third
one is unreadable and the two others have no such program. Anyone around
with some knowledge about M700-10?
I'm not sure yet what I could help with in the Linux/MIPS development.
Probably not much as far as the kernel is concerned, except for testing.
Maybe something in userland.
I'm a fairly experienced programmer, and a long-time Linux user (I've used
Linux since early 0.95, and a Linux PC has been my office workstation for
several years now). My job is software development, and we have a mixed
enviroment of Suns, SGIs and HPs at work. My Linux PC is one of the
absolutely most stable systems here.. not bad for a "hackers OS" :-)
Hopefully I could do something for Linux/MIPS -- I'll first try to get it
up and running here, some way or another.
Regards,
Tor Arntsen (tor@spacetec.no)
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