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The Joys Of Porting 89

Posted by Hemos from the you-go-this-way-i-go-that-way dept.
Gambit Thirty-Two writes "Old news, but Sendmail has ported their MTA to Linux390." And in other news: sitz writes "It would appear as though some madman has port apache to WinCE <Insert witty beowulf comment here>. It's only been tested on a couple of platforms (including the Jornada 720, and is 'based on the WinNT port, with lots of dirty modifications'. That's still pretty swanky. I've also set up a mirror of this site, which will be up for a couple of weeks." Update: 08/27 15:19 PM GMT by H : Yes, the Sendmail story is a dupe - somebody didn't read my story before posting his. *grin*
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The Joys Of Porting More

The Joys Of Porting

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  • Old News (Score:3, Funny)

    by yooden ( 115278 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @09:44AM (#2220996) Homepage
    Yup, I already read it somewhere [slashdot.org]. If I would remember where [slashdot.org], I would post a link [slashdot.org] to it.
  • Is that Sendmail bit really so important we have to read it twice? In a row?

  • Previous Story (Score:1, Redundant)

    by JWW ( 79176 )
    Isn't the previous stroy about Sendmail on the IBM mainframe too?

  • OK, this post is really screwed up. Someone needs to fix the broken link and rethink the organization of the paragraph there. I'm sure I'm not the only one who doesn't appreciate the "stream of conciousness" style writing in this one...
  • Slashdot has a new slogan:

    "Sendmail for Nerds, Sendmail that matters"
  • The bug is clear, it was MS NT.

  • too late again! (Score:5, Funny)

    by tewwetruggur ( 253319 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @09:51AM (#2221025) Homepage
    And here I've been spending countless hours porting Apache to my abacus, as I've recently decided to switch my betamax player from webserver to firewall.


    BTW: does anyone have any info on getting an abacus to use wireless ethernet? I thought linksys made an adapter, but I can't seem to find one at BestBuy...

    • BTW: does anyone have any info on getting an abacus to use wireless ethernet? I thought linksys made an adapter, but I can't seem to find one at BestBuy...

      Best Buy can't help you, but don't abandon hope - just search pricewatch on "up down up up up dot up up down up B."

    • Re:too late again! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Lxy ( 80823 )
      does anyone have any info on getting an abacus to use wireless ethernet?

      I can't find a good article on it, but you could use the sounds made from the abacus as a modem. Granted, it'd be a slower connection but it would be wireless to several feet. The sounds made by an abacus are more digital than analog so you could send an audible digital tone (a series of clicks) and use a speaker on the Betamax (long live beta!) to recieve the signal. Just set up PPP on /dev/audio and you should be able to run a room's length wirelessly. Just don't tell /. about it, I'd hate to see your abacus get DDoS'd.
    • Now who is going to be the first uber-geek to implement Lego Mindstorms using an Abacus as static storage?

      The gauntlet has been thrown down. I'm sure this would make a Slashdot story.
  • Yet another STUPID port! Except for the ability to say yes that is a web server in my pocket and no I am NOT happy to see you....I see no point (well, not much of one anyway). How come they can't port useful things like gtk and the GIMP to WinCE? I would do it except I would NOT be the guy to take this as a learning C project! :) But seriously, I would pay for a WinCE version of the Gimp! All other graphics editors on WinCE suck. I would buy a Compaq Ipaq.....but until there's sync and all pim support for either Linux or Windows, I will NOT run Linux on a iPaq.
    • And speaking of stupid ports, why in the hell would you want to do professional graphics editing on a three inch 320x240 screen.
      • Easy! I want a free (speach and beer) graphics viewer and editor. I would like to use a PEN to draw instead of a mouse. When I am bored, I can doodle with it and make doodles that may be worth something. Many MANY uses for this type of thing.

        What may even be cooler is if someone could put a zoomed in portion of the graphic your editing on the Pocket PC screen and the full size one on the regular CRT (of course this is while it's connected via active sync) and I edit the zoomed in one and see the changes on the full sized one....cool eh? I think someone did this with one of the color pda's out there, but I am not sure which one.
    • It's fun. And a cool hack. Some of us get into that sort of thing. Really, what's the point of porting a server OS (such as, say, Linux) to a Palm Pilot? Palm OS is already perfectly good for running a Palm, so why do the port? Because it's fun.
    • I can see how this would be useful... When the next generation palm/visors come out you'll be able to get a wireless card, dynamic ip addy and a web cam and throw the whole getup into the women's locker room...

      I mean... No, no, that's exactly what I mean...

  • SQL Server for WinCE (Score:3, Funny)

    by kruczkowski ( 160872 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @10:00AM (#2221053) Homepage
    At work here we have the MSDN Subscription, and we have all the MS software. (but no games) 3 binders full of cd and this does not include the 2 for technet and 1 for marketing.

    One day I was browsing thru the cds and found, "SQL Server for Windows CE"
    • This is the Microsoft data engine or whatever (I can't recall the name, and am too lazy to look it up). It's essentially a personal SQL (one user) engine... Why do this? Well, it's good for portable apps (like on a CE or a laptop) that disconnect from the network. You set up replication so when the user plugs into the LAN, they automatically get DB updates so the app functions off-line and their transactions (like orders they placed with an order entry app or something) get replicated to the master DB... it can be pretty damn slick.

      Plus, if you just just want to develop and learn ADO against SQL, just use it (it's downloadable somewhere on the microsoft MSDN site).
    • You can also get IBM DB2 Everyplace [ibm.com] for PocketPC, Palm, Linux and a few others. SQL Server for CE is the same sort of principle.

      Basically, you sync database data to the PDA. You write apps for the PDA that use and/or change this data, and when you sync, it syncs the database both ways.
  • ... hemos is going to post a goatse or compugeek link and not even realize it for several hours. What an idiot.
  • Has anyone thought if bluetooth actually takes off, how cool this would be? We could have the WWWW and the W4c (Wireless World Wide Web). :-)
  • Well. Apparently /. is having trouble with link tags and HTML tags eh? Someone better go up and clean up the mess :)

    Porting is cool and all, being able to run anything on anything is neat. But sometimes if you look at ports you have to just ask yourself.... why? And what's the deal with a beowulf cluster of wince devices? You would be better off just making a beowulf cluster of 486 dx 100's or older Pentiums, and you could probably make it 2 or 3 times as big. It's interesting to see stuff ported to WINCE Devices since the hardware is so different, but how decent a server platform is WINCE really?
    Anyway. I guess it's kind of cool, but more than anything else, it's more of a 'hobbyist/fun' appeal, than having any real world application. I mean I doubt you'll find any 'mission critical' apps running of a wince device. Of course with what I've been reading about /.'s new cluster going up and down, maybe it's based on CE. :)
  • I have made a port using Napier bones [maxmon.com]. Perhaps you can build off of my work. I also don't have ethernet running but perhaps we can work together on that!
  • Is anyone else here really bothered by the fact that there is no close parenthesis in the story. Just for my piece of mind I have to post a )
  • You wouldn't have to scan very far back through old articles to find the original posting of this bit of news. Actually, you'd have to go back one article.

    Please make that much of an effort next time.
  • What's the point of running a server on a device that spends 99% of it's time not on a network?!
    • there is no point to a web server on wince, as scripting, pipes and other useful things violate M$'s busine$$ model. We'll see that company in chapeter 11 before we see it punished by the feds.

      It might be useful on an Agenda, if it had a cellphone or wireless to a local net. Information from rounds, sales calls, what not, could be formated and displayed as HTML to those interested. A webcam might also be interesting. Why not? Also useful would be SMTA. Breaking that last mile looks like fun that way.

  • At first I thought it was lame... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LenE ( 29922 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @10:44AM (#2221236) Homepage
    The WinCE apache thing, but then it hit me.

    It isn't about the general type of web server that we know and love. It's about a portable transaction platform!

    Imagine that you are a salesman, contractor or other individual who travels and does business with many different people in many different places. If you had a 802.11 (I don't think bluetooth will make it) enabled Jornada or iPaq, then you could cary a web-based transaction server with you, wherever you go. You wouldn't need a fixed IP, nor a constant broadband link to the internet.

    You could hop on to your client's wireless LAN, or establish a peer-to-peer link to make your transaction server (e-business whatever) appear local to your clients. They could do business with you, and you take your web-site and data with you when you leave. In this way, you could use a near universal interface (web browser) to handle customer interactions, without having to scrawl all of the information in by a flaky pen-based interface.

    This would be a very cheap way of doing business, with less threat of being cracked by some script kiddie.

    -- Len
  • If you could get this Win CE Apache port working with the Dreamcast Win CE EXE loader [205.134.182.35] and possibly, the Dreamcast hard drive hack [gaming-xtreme.com].

    A DC'll run you 79 bucks. The keyboard and mouse, another 40 or so.
  • Which is what we'll get soon with version 4 of this crud. Wouldn't it be better to have a relatively bugless web server?

  • News? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dasmegabyte ( 267018 ) <das@OHNOWHATSTHISdasmegabyte.org> on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:22AM (#2221411) Homepage Journal
    I've been running apache on my Cassiopeia for almost two years, i didn't know it was such a big deal! It was a nice way to step into connectivity on CE (apache having such decent docs and so many hackers at bay, it's a pleasure to port it) and also allows me to use my palm browser to browse pages dynamically. Useless? Naw. I can get an XML file from the Bentley manual to my Volkswagen and feed the information for a repair into pocket apache, then serve the info inside the file (including some SVG gfx) at a decent enough speed into my broswer. In a ten to fifteen page repair, i'd otherwise have to print everything out, thus wasting paper and creating a solution that won't last one oil change. Now, I just zip the palm pc in a freezer bag and BAM! Pocket Mechanic.

    And for those of you naysayers out there, no, there isn't a paper manual for my engine, just the (poorly) encrypted XML version on CD.
  • Doesn't the Dreamcast run a specialized verison of WinCE? Won't the XBox? Hmmmmm....boggles the mind....

  • Server on a PDA (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SteveHeadroom ( 13143 )

    My initial reaction to the various servers ported to PDAs was "Why???". But the more I think about it, the more potential I see for it.

    The biggest gain would be the elimination of proprietary synchronozation software/protocols. Right now, if I want to access my address book from a PC, I have to hookup the cradle (which requires a free serial or USB port, assuming your machine has functional USB support) install the sync software/drivers (assuming you're running the right OS) and then synchronize (which copies everything to the PC, which might not be a good idea if you're sync'ing to a machine at work).

    Instead, say my PDA was running a mini-LDAP server that was acting as a front-end to my address book. Outlook, Outlook Express and Netscape Messenger all support LDAP, so any of them would have immediate access to my address book.

    Of course, this all assumes your PDA is capable of Ethernet or 802.11.

    An FTP server running on a PDA would be perfect for moving files. A web server would be able to serve up your notes, todo list, etc as HTML, complete with editting forms.

    One snag I see is that you might not be able to run multiple servers on a PDA at once. In that case, you would need a universal protocol to piggyback everything on top of, such as SOAP running on a web server, then you would just need some SOAP based APIs, and software that could understand them. Hmmmm.

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