BDI history (was: Z axis Offsets)

[Paul <paul.corner-at-tesco.net>]

Hi Tim

A short history of the BDI project -

The phrase Brain Dead Install was coined by Dave Land back in February 2000 
for a way of getting a computer up and running with EMC. Due to certain 
heated debates on the CCED list, the project died a death. This, I have 
always considered as Version 1, maybe it would have been better labeled Ver 0.

Over the Christmass, New Year 2001 period, I was playing around with Mandrake 
and looking at what made the install shell tick. Finding it to be a real 
fight to understand Perl and the way the install functioned, I decided to 
give RedHat a go. After some initial success with RH, and with a lot 
encouragement from Ray Henry, some beta disks were dispatched to a select 
band of UK testers. By the end of March, and after several changes I felt the 
CD was at a stage where it was ready for distribution, so an announcement was 
made on the 1st April. To this day, I'm surprised that not one wag passed 
comment on the timing !

Version 2.04 was quite a success, and with copies sent to all corners of the 
world, some bugs have been reported. These have been fixed, and as extra 
packages have been requested, the version number has been incremented to the 
current 2.10 release.

For the future, I'm currently working with RTAI, RedHat 7.2 (beta), and the 
latest CVS sources. I doubt if this will make it to a BDI release, as I find 
much of the hardware that works with RH6.x crashes or fails to work at all.
A 2.2.19 kernel with rtlinux-3.1 is however, likely to be featured on the 
next CD. XFree86-4 might be included, but only in an updates directory as 
binary and source tarballs - No easy to use RPMs.

If there are any requests for utilities and "must have" packages, let me 
know, and I will endeavor to add them to BDI-2.12.


Regards, Paul.



On Friday 28 September 2001  9:51 pm, Tim Goldstein wrote:
> Whoops,
>
> Make that BDI 2.09. Knew it was X.09, but guessed that BDI started at 1.