Highland Ham wrote:


Also Linux doesn't need the latest and fastest machine .
I run my system on a motherboard with a 1GHz Athlon processor and 1024MB
of RAM ,from AD 2001.

To me that is a supercomputer class machine; linux kernel development
unfortunately is a moving target and your arrows had better be made of
recent generation silicon. For those of us who need to target old x86
(386, 486, PI, PII and PIII) and cpus in the embedded space, (ARM7, etc.)
I recommend researching the large number of alternative OSs available
including *BSD, OpenSolaris, various RTOSes like UCOS-II, FreeRTOS, eCOS,
opensource MS-DOS workalikes and others with much smaller footprints, for
amateur radio related work unless your intended user applications are
linux specific. If you are doing DSP or realtime development, I
urge you to consider an RTOS over any *ix.

The linux machines (x86, ARM7 and others) in my domain are all at 2.4.x
kernels due to the increasing requirements of newer kernel versions; in
fact I maintain some 0.9x and 1.x linux systems for special requirements
for their relative simplicity.

Regards,

Michael