Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!news.funet.fi!funic!santra!santra!jvh From: jvh@niksula.hut.fi (Johannes Helander) Newsgroups: comp.sys.nsc.32k Subject: Re: ET532 Message-ID: Date: 2 May 91 13:28:28 GMT References: <<9104221326.AA23689@mozart.convex.com>> Sender: news@santra.uucp (Cnews - USENET news system) Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, CS Lab. Lines: 34 In-Reply-To: kls@ditka.Chicago.COM's message of Mon, 29 Apr 91 12:07:02 PDT In article kls@ditka.Chicago.COM (Karl Swartz) writes: > there yet, and it certainly isn't on the pc532 version. Unix can do > it but at this point that only helps a few Finns. (No offense.) We hope to have the pc532 Mach 3.0 kernel included in the CMU free distribution RSN. The ux server is unfortunately not free. If you have the Mach 3.0 ux server for the i386, we'll be able to send you diffs. To get those sources you first need a un*x source license. Then CMU may be able to help you with that. The GNU servers will probably be available in a year or so... (?). Anyways, to be able to run Mach, a MMU is required. Thus a gx32 is not sufficient. One possibility would be to put a 532 on the etherboard. But then it's going to be an "almost pc532" with ethernet. It thus comes to my mind that instead of building the ET532 a possibilty would be to make a second revision of the pc532 and put the ether chip there. This would solve the problem for future pc532 buyers and those of us who want to get an ethernet card could buy a second pc532. If the ET532 is going to be as expensive so what is the difference (except some design work)? To try to solve the cheap and simple ethernet problem, Jukka Virtanen designed a daughter board board that would be plugged in the PROM socket and one PAL socket. It is a four layer board. The National ether chip was not used because it seems to be very hard to get. We then found out how expensive it is to manufacture even four layer boards so the board has not been built. Maybe somebody (George?) could take a look at that design and evaluate it. This might anyhow be one possible solution for the ethernet issue. Johannes