Linux kernel hacking is a cool thing. You get the feeling of having full control over your machine and you can take part in a really big project where programmers invest time and money not for profit but to create something new and good. Some of my work luckily made it into the mainstream kernel, other parts are not ready yet. Well, letīs see what the future brings us...
Unlike DOS, the official Linux Kernel still lacks support for flash bioses. I wrote a little kernel driver that allows you to flash nearly every bios chip in your computer (even on graphics and scsi adapters) Iīd consider this quite stable, at least on the tested hardware. /dev/bios - Universal BIOS FlashROM support.
PCs have had BIOSes since the dawn of time. And since the beginning, they have been DOS-specific, 16-bit, real-mode, etc. -- not something that a modern OS such as Linux, Hurd, or BSD can use. The OpenBIOS group intends to create a free BIOS for PCs. OpenBIOS Project
UAE is a mostly complete software emulation of the hardware of the Commodore Amiga 500/1000/2000. A Commodore Amiga, for those who don't know, is a 16/32 bit computer system based on the Motorola 680x0 CPU and a few specially designed custom chips that provide very good graphics and sound capabilities. Its first incarnation, the A1000, appeared in 1985, followed by the highly successful A500 and A2000 models. Unix Amiga Emulator.
I own an Amiga 3000 myself. It has a standard 66030/25 and a 68882 coprocessor, 18 MB Ram and 2 Gigs Harddisk. It is running Linux and AmigaOS. Nice machine which reminds me of childhood :-) And of course, I use it for all projects where a big endian machine is needed. 0xdeadbeef.
When the first Linux distributions for Linux/m68k came out, there was no way the determin partition sizes or change the partition tables on an Amiga running Linux. So I took some old code I found and wrote amiga-fdisk 0.04 - An FDisk for Amiga RDB harddisks (consider this alpha)
With some friends I founded a Linux User Group in Freiburg/Germany. Currently the FLUG has members. This Linux Group is a meeting point for Linux users and hackers in the region around Freiburg. Topics are new Linux Software, Kernel Hacking, discussing problems and of course drinking beer and eating pizza :-). Visit the homepage of the Freiburger Linux User Group (F.L.U.G.)