Re: Direction of VSTa

> what is the further way of VSTa?

To boldly go where no OS has gone before :)

> Will there be more man pages?
> Will there be Runes?
> Will there be a system in the file system? I.e. source and binary
> in different directories?
> Will there be support for other CPUs than the Intel family?
> Will there be the sources for the man system?

I would assume "conditionally yes" on all counts. It's conditional on
someone actually going out and doing it. I've worked on collecting all of
the "docs/information" I can, and I've put it on a web page at
"http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/~jeske/VSTa/".

There is already support for the Amiga (030 I believe) which is at least
semi-working.

> Ok, I have a MIPS system I want to port VSTa to. Someone has started
> it, that seems to be not the problem. But there is NO documentation
> that could help me. Am I right?

I think the guy who was doing the MIPS port disappeared. The CODE for
VSTa is incredibly well documented and orginized. For someone capable
enough to do a port to another processor, this should be a great help.

> For now I have a FreeBSD system I edit my sources on. This is because
> I need a machine I could see both, the VSTa and the FreeBSD sources on.
> Then I boot VSTa on that machine (486 with an Adaptec SCSI board).
> Compile my sources to a new server; CAM is his name. And after that I
> boot DOS to copy the server to a boot disk for my 386SX VSTA machine.
> Then I do some testing.
> You see, a lot of OS is needed to do my work.
> So, what I need is a VSTa machine with a graphic front end and enough
> driver to support MY hardware. I.e I also have a wd8003 board. Not
> a NE2000 clone.

You could just setup a cross compile environment on FreeBSD. I believe
this should be possible, I know alot of people cross compile from Linux.

> But I don't even know how to fork a process. There is no description....

Look through the libc code or the include files.

> But what about Plan9. Am I right that they have a Berkeley style
> copyright? And that they have more documentation?

Plan9 has a different focus than VSTa, and is commercially produced by
AT&T Bell Labs. Plan9 is a complete OS which you can get and run (and
they just made some easy educational license or something). VSTa is a OS
which is a work in progress. If your looking to get an OS up and running
without writing code, go for Plan9, if your looking to do OS work and
help by contributing to a free project, work on VSTa.
Received on Mon Aug 7 08:18:24 1995