Linux On a Used Cash Register

codewolf writes: "Looking at this site, it seems that if someone has enough time on their hands, they can get Linux to run on just about anything. Looks like this guy got Red Hat Linux running on an Ultimate Techonologies Corporation cash register. This is a great hack if you ask me."

Re:Its a P233 pc

[Anonymous Coward]

linux is ported the c64

lng.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]

Re:Its a P233 pc

[HeUnique]

already done [netsurf.de] :)

Intresting... Not too hard but intresting.

[FIRESTORM_v1]

I think that getting the display pole is pretty schweet, however the "embedded PC" at the cash register is not anything unexpected. I have a pair of SASI terminals that used to belong to a CoastalMart in town. They had a log 16bit ISA card that connected their peripherials to the box as well as a laptop's 1.2GB HDD downsized to 500MB.. (1024,16,63... familiar?) All I had to do was remove the propietary card that contained a bootROM and voila, a perfectly good P200,32mB RAM 4MB ATI video.. These had PCI in them as well.. One's my router and one is my webserver.. If you are a hardware freak, like I am, you are always on the constant lookout for embedded boxes of this sort.. Cash registers are higly sought out after for this reason... After all, why use a suitcase for a router when you have a shoebox available..

Good catch on the hardware!!

Been done already: L'ānePOS.

[RJarett]

L'ânePOS is a linux/postgres Point of Sale system.
http://l-ane.sourceforge.net/nic.html

Based on a ThinkNIC, but can be used with any system

Jarett

Linux PoS

[BiggyP]

and people actually sell linux PoS systems,

http://www.internetweek.com/ebizapps01/ebiz07160 1- 1.htm

http://www.viewtouch.com/poshome.html

Re:Its a P233 pc

[Lumpy]

first off it isnt a LED display it is a Vaccum Flouresent Display (VFD) (Please excuse my spelling, I just got up, I cant find My glasses, and My hands are still wet from the shower... Ooops too much information)

VFD's are easy to get to talk to linux, they act just like a LCD and if it is serial I am betting that it takes standard Matrox Orbital commands so he just downloaded the code from one of the linux pages on how to talk to one of these things.

Hey, If I install linux on my PC can I get a story on slashdot?? That is exactly what this is.

Now the industrial touchscreens I have that are water,weather,freeze proof... that is a cool hack, but not worthy of a slashdot story...

Re:well if you need reliability...

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend are using delphi to code for cash registers at his complany, so I guess they are running winblows on thoose machines.

Re:This is not necessarily a "good thing"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has spent alot of time and effort
warning retailers of the dangers of using linux.
Microsoft sent out a warning to all retailers
that was filled to the rafters with a big huge
pile of FUD, on how bad linux is for POS.
POS is big business. This IS for real. It may not
win a nobel prize but the more people that become
aware of it the better.
A distribution that has a POS option would be a
huge plus for open source operating systems.

Re:OK so what

[Permission Denied]

Linux on a Mac is harder than that. I got up and running on an old old mac with 32M ram, harder than what that guy did (boot red hat installer and leave overnight).

I feel your pain. I had to get Linux running on a bunch of old Macs. God, those machines sucked. 16M ram, 180 MHz first-generation PowerPC. Getting X to work was such a PITA - it uses the kernel framebuffer stuff which, at the time, was undocumented. Had to go searching through kernel source to figure out what boot paramaters to pass it. These things were so damned slow - felt like a 386 even though they're supposed to be faster than that. There's like a half second latency for any exec(), even for stuff you've just run - makes every mundane 'ls' seem like a big event.

These machines were constantly swapping - even when you weren't doing anything, the disk was busy. Thus, these things chewed through hard disks right quick (fortunately, Macs don't have b0rked BIOSes like PCs and even the oldest Macs with IDE can accept the newest, biggest hard drives). Compiling anything is an overnight process, and compiling kernels was a week-long process (try it, come back next day, figure out what broke the build, fix it, try again, ad nauseam).

I had to actually code for this thing. Oh, how that sucked. Even using 'vi' was too damned slow. Formatting man pages took like thirty seconds. Of course, I would do all my development on a real machine and port it over, but I still had to work with the damned Macs when my compile broke because they had a different version of some library and so on.

The exec() thing was killer. My code needed to use multiple processes or threads. The multiprocess approach didn't work too well, and using threads didn't help as there's little difference between a thread and a process in Linux (compared to Solaris, for instance). I started playing with using MIT pthreads compiled to do in-process threading, just to get decent performance (lazy, didn't want to write my own in-process scheduler). I eventually just gave up and just let the damned things run slow.

Never again.