On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 10:46:36AM -0700, nate wrote: > deFreese, Barry said: > > First of all, my apologies for the OT question, we seem to be straying > > quite a bit these days. Now for the WAY OT question: > > > > We are running a lot of Symbol technologies scanners here in the > > warehouse and I noticed that they are using DRDOS for the OS, running > > Novell's free (old) IP stack. My thought was "I wonder if I could get an > > embedded Linux running on this thing"? They have 128K EPROM that holds > > the OS, BIOS, and terminal diagnostics, 640K of RAM and 256K of standard > > non-volatile memory (apperently upgradeable to 1.2M). The one caveat is > > that it would need a 5250 emulator as well and I have yet to find a 5250 > > emulator for Linux that works. > > > I've never heard of any linux kernel that could boot in less then, 2MB > of ram I think(maybe its 4MB). > > 128k EPROM doesn't sound like enough for even a kernel let alone some > userland stuff.
You could always use one of the really old Linux kernels, like 1.0.x old. IIRC, Linus has even officially appointed a maintainer to keep things `up to date'. Combined with busybox, you might get something going. Even if you could get a kernel to build small enough to fit in the EPROM, I don't think you're going to fit much of a userland in there. Plus, a 32-bit, multi-processing, VM'ing Unix-like and POSIX-compatible OS seems like a little bit of overkill for a scanner:) Of course, you'll earn geek-cred up the wazoo if you got it to work. Good luck, and keep us informed. -rob
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