Hello, I'm sure some of you were interested in my old-computing-for-two-weeks project, which was finished a few days ago. I've been rather bored as of late, the weather's atrocious, TV is as shit-filled as usual, and I've had issues with my server/development PC which I'm gonig to deal with later. Anyway, I decided to what what I usually do in this sort of situation: transfer some money into my PayPal account and look on eBay. I transferred £32 (about 50 dollars for you yanks) and had a look. I decided to buy a Dreamcast keyboard and VGA adapter, which are on their way here. Why these two items? The answer is as clear as day: I was wanting to try out Dreamcast Linux again. I had grabbed a Live CD for the Dreamcast in 2001 but I didn't have a keyboard nor a VGA adapter for decent graphics, so I forgot about it. It just so happened today I was clearing out some old, unnecessary stuff (mainly cables) when I stumbled upon my Dreamcast. I knew I had to put it to use. I believe Dreamcast support is in the Linux 2.6 mainline kernel, which will help. Gentoo has a prebuilt stage3 for SH4 at releases/sh/current-stage3/ which I hope to use to create a Live CD. Failing that, I'll simply compile a kernel and bung on a basic filesystem. I'm hoping to get a basic setup working with X11 and using TWM as a WM. Log: Ordered everything, and downloading the Gentoo stage3 as of now.
Interesting project. There are people who actually do this with the PS3, it'll be interesting to see how a technical step backwards works out.
Overlord: I'd imagine the PS3 would be a lot easier to do it on, since Sony actually encoruage homebrew/Linux on their console. Skaarg: I'm on the lookout for a DC broadband adapter, if I get it, it's an RTL8139 inside, should work no bother. The keyboard has been dispatched today - hopefully I'll get it by Wednesday
Some news on the project: The Dreamcast keyboard arrived. I plugged in a quick Linux liveCD I made and hit a snag - the picture, it doesn't fit my TV. Hopefully the VGA adapter will solve that. I will also try and get a dreamcast mouse, so X is usable.
