@pwm@mint@Merc@p@w0rm You're only one hard-on away from installing Steam on that machine. Unless you use a netbook, in that case you are definitely not going to have to worry about games.
@nyanide@pwm@Merc@mint@w0rm Are you kidding? Nethack runs on DOS, even. (Nethack takes multiple hardons, though. It's an annoying game until you get your bearings.)
It's actually good for basically any dev work, it's the only thing I use. Comes with a shit-ton of troff templates, too. But a niche OS lives in a niche, you expect it to W in that niche.
@p@iska@Merc@mint@w0rm For the majority of development I've tested it against an emulated LMI Lambda Lisp machine. The Lambda software was the best to base the port off of, since it was made free to coincide with the emulator a few years ago and is a bit more modernized (compared to the CADR, at least). Common Lisp is a direct descendant of ZetaLisp, so the vast majority of the code was trivially portable; the most difficult parts were mostly rectifying implementation differences and fixing bugs. The Lambda does Chaos over Ethernet, which Mezzano does too. I can bridge a tap interface from QEMU to LambdaDelta and have them talk to each other.
The actual NCP has been working for a while now, with stream connections running smoothly. I had the FILE protocol code fixed up enough to just compile, and be working on the DNS gateway.
At the moment I'm debugging the Chaos-over-UDP transport, which will allow it to talk to Chaosnet bridges over the Internet. I have one of those as well as a DNS server that serves CH records for my zone (did you know BIND 9 supports that? It's in the original RFC!). I'll have it talking to a CADR and a PDP-10 running ITS at some point.
What's cool about Chaosnet is how complete it feels compared to say, TCP/IP. Writing protocols is easy and fun, and there's no commitment to security or central authority. It couldn't have come out of anywhere but the AI Lab.
It's a direct descendant of everything except Scheme. :gnu:
> The Lambda does Chaos over Ethernet, which Mezzano does too. I can bridge a tap interface from QEMU to LambdaDelta and have them talk to each other.
That's pretty fuckin' slick.
> (did you know BIND 9 supports that? It's in the original RFC!)
I did not know it's in the RFC. I had grepped the titles earlier but didn't grep the actual RFCs. That's kinda fun, it's apparently in RFCs 752, 799, 898, 900, 1037, 1510, 1700, and cited in 919, 922, 2929, 4120, 5395, 6195, 6895. It shows up in tables in a lot of other RFCs, like 923 lists 0x804 as the ethernet message type for Chaosnet. And 0x81c as "Symbolics Private". It lists "DCP1" as the reference and if you scroll down, that's David Plummer. The old RFCs are quaint, it's got everyone's email address.
> At the moment I'm debugging the Chaos-over-UDP transport, which will allow it to talk to Chaosnet bridges over the Internet.
Very cool. Ha, you might accidentally create a tunnel if someone implements Chaosnet's ARPA bridge protocol and then uses Chaosnet-over-UDP to send packets to it.
> I'll have it talking to a CADR and a PDP-10 running ITS at some point.
@iska@mint@p@w0rm@Merc Yes, I'm that guy! Since I'm not sure that the main Mezzano devs would want it as part of the base system, and it does require changes to the netcode, I thought of just making it part of my own fork with other features that I want. I was planning on opening a repo once I had the FILE client working, but I've been pulled in different directions. If you want the patches right now I'd be happy to send them to you; I'm on XMPP.