BDI and BDI-TNG

Hi Folks

It has now been a whole year since the Brain Dead Install for EMC has been
available. Several bugs have been identified, tracked down and fixed thanks
to the feedback given. I have learnt much about the inner workings of EMC and
a whole raft of applications that I would have never touched. Like all of us,
I'm still finding new ways of doing things.
Linux it's self has seen several changes and even more hardware supported.
XFree86 will now run multiple screens with out having to jump through hoops
to configure various undocumented options.
KDE (my favoured Desktop) is now on version 2.2, and is a very slick and
capable alternative to W95/98.

On the downside, a decent CAD/CAM package is desperately needed. A couple of
projects have been started to fill this gap, and there is one commercial
package that I know of.

Over the last twelve months, the BDI has seen a number of revisions, most
have been minor additions to the included packages. Not all versions have
been made public. Of the dozen or so releases, the major public versions have
been 2.04, 2.07. 2.09, and 2.11. The latest in the series is now 2.14 which
has just been completed - This includes XFree86-4.10 as a binary tarball, but
not KDE 2.2 or the latest kernel.

Also available for testing is BDI-TNG. This is a completely new distro based
on RedHat 7.2 and includes KDE 2.2, XFree86-4.2, a 2.4.16 kernel with the
rtai realtime patches applied. The move to rtai has resulted in the loss of
steppermod (until the required changes are made).
There are a few concerns over the 2.4.xx kernels in the linux community, but
I have found it to be stable enough for my needs. The rtai patches have
brought about one possible source of system crashes when using a particular
screensaver.

BDI-TNG is not suited to dumpster grade PCs, a minimum recommended spec would
be 800Mhz processor, 256Mb Ram, 6Gb HD, and a 1024x768 display. Nor would I
recommend BDI-TNG to the linux newbie.

My thanks goes out to everyone who has contributed to both EMC and BDI, even
if it has only been a "This bit doesn't work" comment.


Regards, Paul.