[Coco] Cococompatible monitors... [Now CoCo3FPGA, FPGA Development, and GIME replacement]

[Joel Ewy]

On 07/05/2011 03:10 PM, gene heskett wrote:
> ...
>> ...
>>>>> Would I have to run the development system on windows?  If yes, no
>>>>> deal.
>>>> The software runs under Linux.  It's a 970M download.
>>> Great, not a problem as I have 4 terrabytes of drives here.  URL?
>> This is the only thing I have bookmarked:
>> http://www.xilinx.com/support/download/index.htm
> It took several passes as their site does several things to FireFox5 that
> it didn't like, so I had to use the keyboard to get to another screen and
> shoot it dead with htop the first 2 times, after I had created an account.
>

I have to say, I've been profoundly unimpressed by FF5 so far.  I 
upgraded from 3.6, which took many days or weeks to leak memory into 
swap with literally dozens of tabs open at a time.  FF5 initially seemed 
better.  Then it started crashing all the time, which I finally traced 
down to a bad add-on (fortunately not Adblock Plus or Too Many Tabs).  
Performance in general does seem a little better (you notice they never 
stipulate that it will be better on the same hardware...) but I had to 
clean up a whole lot of tabs, because while it seems to start off not 
consuming huge amounts of RAM, what memory leaks there are seem to leak 
faster, so in just a couple days the machine is swamped and thrashing 
and I've got to kill FF and restart it.  I'm hoping they fix that.
> The 4Gb dl is a tar!  Didn't those folks ever hear of gzip/bzip2/lrzip?
> Sheesh, its probably at least 50x the size it could probably be shrunk to
> with lrzip.  But I should have it in about 3 more hours.
>

What on earth were they thinking?

> That will give some Cabot wood conditioner time to dry on some poplar I am
> trying to control the color of.  If it overstains then, I go back to
> shellac for a sealer.  But this stuff appears to penetrate farther than 2
> lb dewaxed shellac.  The can says not to let it dry else the stain won't,
> and TBT that is about what I want, say 3 coats of Sams stuff that is 25%
> Cabot Gunstock stain should be about right.  The minwax version called
> Golden Pecan takes weeks to dry so that's got to be replaced.  The Cabot
> stuff dries in an hour.  Mixed into Sams, about 12 hours a coat, 3 or 4
> coats = the glass smooth finish folks drool over.
>
>> Now, I only downloaded the 900M one instead of the 4G one where they
>> have high resolution JPEGs and a Bio of each logic gate.  When I
>> originally set up my CoCo3FPGA system I tried an earlier version of
>> Webpack on Win2K.  I finally figured out how to get that to work just to
>> upload the bit file.  That machine has suffered a hardware failure, and
>> I'm just not using MS-Windows enough these days (other than fixing other
>> people's malware-infested boxes) to bother reconstituting it.  Gary's
>> got a new version with pretty 4096-color graphics, so I downloaded the
>> Linux version (I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 on this machine) for the
>> upgrade.  Unfortunately, the Digilent board requires hardware
>> modification for the new colors, and that simply hasn't gotten done yet.
>>
>> Like John K. says, you've got to register with them and do a deal with
>> Rumplestiltskin for your firstborn child, but no money changes hands,
>> and they haven't come to collect Henry yet.
> Chuckle, depending on how old Henry is now, I'd bet there are times you
> hoped they would,  I say that while ducking and looking for cover though.
> ;-)

He's a pretty good kid for an 8 year old.  Anna is 2.  Maybe they could 
borrow her for a year.  Nah.

>> JCE
>>
> Thanks Joel.
>
> Cheers, gene