That is always nice to know I have a couple of people in the IRC channel testing "preview versions" for me, and haven't discovered any major bugs yet. It should be beta as soon as I finish a couple of things (basicly when I get off of irc and boot back into Linux to continue my work ).
The only reason that I would need so much room (about 30 MB) is because I need to keep everything legal and distribute the source. Everything is GNU General Public License or GNU Lesser General Public License, except for the shell which is under a BSD license, the code that I wrote to make everything run (building your own Linux distribution from the ground up requires a fair deal of scripting ), and the dnet client which, although they say on their cilent download page that you should only be downloading from them, they don't expressly prohibit redistribution anywhere that I can see. They basicly only say that it has to be used in distributed.net projects (which it will be), and that you have to have the hardware owner's permission to run the client. Since they don't respond to e-mail, there is no choice to have it somewhere other than the distributed.net website (though I would like to work something out, dnet!), so I guess that it will have to hosted somewhere like Russ's, or Jay's if he/they is/are willing
Yet another edit ---> Also, I should probably say that there are a few featuers that I was originaly hoping for that arn't goint to make it in at this point in time. One is DHCP support (I never got around to getting a DHCP server going to test it with ) and the other is writing information to disk. It should be possible, but I don't know if it would really be worth the effort since I am hoping that everything should be fairly stable, although I supose there is always power outages to worry about. One interesting idea that I came up with, but that isn't going to happen any time soon (or atleast not untill I get a fast always on internet conneciton), is building customer images server side. it theoreticly wouldn't be hard to do, it would require reworking the structure of the init scritps a little bit, but they could probably be made more "plug and playable" so that you could just have the server copy everything into a temporary directory, generate a couple of small configuration dependent files, and then build build the image all within a few seconds so that the users values would be hard wired in, but like I said, that probably won't happen at least untill some company brings broad band to the Village of Livingston.
Another edit --> Just thought that I should also say that the list of network card drivers has grown a bit from what it originaly was. Here is the current included drivers.
- 3c503
- 3c515
- 3c509/3c579
- 3c590/3c900 (592/595/597) "Vortex/Boomerang"
- WD80*3
- SMC Ultra (I haven't forgotten about you Russ )
- NE2000/NE1000
- AMD Lance and PCnet (AT 1550 and NE2100)
- AMD PCnet32
- DECchip Tulip (dc21x4x) PCI - Old driver
- EtherExpressPro / EtherExpress 10 (i82595)
- EtherExpressPro/100
- TI ThunderLAN
Also, the client should (in theory) be able to work on a 486sx now (it really increased the size of the kernel to add FPU emulation support, but I had, and still have, quite a bit of free space on the floppy; however, if that ever changes, the FPU emulation will probably be the first thing to go). Although the least ammount of memory that I have tried it with it 16MB, I am guessing that the minimum required memory would probably be 8MB (although I wouldn't be
too supprised if it would run fine on 4MB), but like the ability to run on a 486sx, and about 75% of the network drivers, the minimum memory ammount hasn't really been tested yet.