[ILUG] ILUG BBC

[Niall O Broin]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 11:36:46PM +0000, Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> 
> are there any plans for a new version of the BBC?  I still find it very
> useful (I'm right now dialled up from my home pc whose hard disk failed
> last week and am working off the BBC) but it's a little behind the times
> now.  ssh2 would be a first major thing, perhaps newer version of vim, a
> 2.4 kernel with reiser, ext3 (not to mention many other things) support,
> maybe Xfree86 v4 (although maybe that's too ambitious).

Have a look at  http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6535

> IIRC it was based on the linuxcare one, whose new version supports much (if
> not all) of the above, wireless etc.

The ILUG BBC was based on the original Linuxcare version. As Linuxcare
shrank dramatically, many of the developers of the BBC were shown the door
and they founded the LNX-BBC project, which is approaching a shiny new
release (see above).

> This may have been an enormous amount of work which nobody has time for any
> more which is fair enough if that's the case.

It was quite some work, although most of that was in figuring out how to
disasemble a BBC, modify it, and reassemble it, which was not documented.
The new version builds in a completely different way and it's my intention
to get a copy of the build environment early in the new year and build an
ILUG BBC ver. 2.0 based on it. As it incorporates some of the changes that
were in the original ILUG BBC and of course a whole lot more, I think that
all that will be really necessary will be to install an appropriate
wvdial.conf file with Irish phone numbers.

Perhaps those who have any interest in the ILUG BBC and have decent
bandwidth could D/L one of the current ISOs (about 50 MB), burn to a CD (of
course it doesn't have to be a BBC CD) and check it out in whatever machines
you have available and give feedback to the project about any problems you
encounter.




Niall