An ancient build of Linux for Acorn PC cards has been uploaded to riscos.info as part of a new drive to revive the PC Card Linux project. The zipfile dates back to 1994, and contains Linux 1.1.29 and suitable drivers for pre-RiscPC machines fitted with PC cards. During the 1990s, Acorn and Aleph1 produced a range of PC cards for RiscPC and pre-RiscPC machines, which featured Intel 486-compatible processors. This allowed RISC OS users to run Windows and PC applications from their otherwise ARM-powered desktop machines.
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Member since:
2006-01-16
Member since:
2006-07-26
Those remind me of the little PDS cards for the Quadra 610 DOS and Powermac 6100 DOS (and later third-party PCI cards for newer machints). Very peculiar little creatures, host a 486, soundblaster compatible sound, and optionally some RAM. They're highly dependent on the mac-side software, and (in a few OSes and situations with suitable drivers) actually allows copy/paste between the mac and "PC". I played with a 6100/DOS's boot process a while ago, it seems to look for a MS DOS boot sector when trying to boot, which means you have to use SysLinux to boot "alternative" OSes on them. Hours of tinkering fun, if not especially useful anymore. I've occasionally seen newer iterations of the dependnt-computer-on-a-card concept, and it always intrigues me.
Some information for the curious:
http://pw2.netcom.com/~sgulie/doscardfaq.htm