hackbyte (friendica) 13HB1<p>Weird ideas part OVERFLOW.</p><p>PiT, Short for Pi Terminal.</p><p>At times, all you need is a frickin dumb VT100, VT102 or maybe even fancy VT220 serial terminal.</p><p>I'm not that much into retro computing stuff myself, but even i could use a simple terminal at times.</p><p>So .. usually you might go on and bring a real terminal from the good old times.... or. if you don't have any.</p><p>You take some PC running Windows using Teraterm (or better (putty?;))... Or some linux box, opening a terminal, running some fancy commands or just plain minicom.</p><p>Which is mostly all well and nice....</p><p>But do you actually need to run a full fledged operating system for that?</p><p>I think not.</p><p>But mkay, lets get slowly with those horses.</p><p>Writing your very own kernel just to create a fancy terminal on a ARM box seems to be really unreasonable. One can do that as a esoteric adventure... But i'm truly not that man to go that deep into it..</p><p>Another alternative might be, taking a established stable kernel with all needed hardware drivers, and build on top of that.</p><p>And there it gets funky. Naturally, you wanna go with a linux kernel, compiled down to your specific tasks (what do we need? VGA Framebuffer, TTY, Serial Drivers ... and profit?).</p><p>But then, you still need to care about the full fledged linux userland around all that..</p><p>There are two ways to go on this route.</p><p>Option one: You go on and write your very own init process, maybe just in python or Go or whatever you like.</p><p>You still need to set up a bunch of stuff for your serial tty to work. But that shouldn't be too bad overall.... But it's still a heck of a load of work. Do not forget, you replace /bin/init and all the setup it does.</p><p>Or you go with Option Two:</p><p>Create a minimalistic linux from scratch, wich only boots up and starts to run minicom and that is it.</p><p>You get exactly that. A running minicom command on one console... And maybe a busybox shell on a second one... There's no real linux (userspace) system supporting anything but that in the background.</p><p><br>In the moment i first thought about it, i thought, it might be nice to call it PiTOS or something like that.</p><p>But actually having a full fledged OS behind the terminal, was exactly the thing i wanted to avoid in the first place.</p><p><br>Just a convenient terminal. Connecting a keyboard via usb, giving visuals out by some means of hdmi ... and that's it.. (mkay, besides RS232 hardware for uplink connections).</p><p><br>As i said, just some random and weird idea coming to my mind. ;)</p><p><a href="https://friendica.utzer.de/search?tag=RandomShit" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>RandomShit</span></a> ;)</p>