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The Icon Bar: News and features: New releases
 

New releases

Posted by Richard Goodwin on 10:11, 25/1/2002 | , , , , ,
 
Mr. The Vigay told me about it, and Drobe have it up as news, so I went ahead and called Castle - yes, Castle Technology Ltd. have 100baseT network cards up on their website. There's not a lot of detail - name and price basically - but I decided to order one anyway. They'll ship in February, or basically when they arrive, and come in both RiscPC NIC and standard podule formats. Apparently the podule version is slightly faster though, which is what I went for in the end. Prices appear to be the same as the old 10bT ones.

And Insignia has now been released by Cerilica. As previously reported Insignia is a very cool logo creation program which allows you to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things to text such as texturing, halftoning, lens flares and the like. There's even a demo version on the website. P.T. Vigay even has a competition on his website to win a copy.
 
  New releases
  This is a long thread. Click here to view the threaded list.
 
Richard Walker Message #89933, posted at 10:37, 25/1/2002
Unregistered user It's great to see a 100baseT card at last! It's just a shame that RiscStation 7500s and MicroDigital's Mico can't have 100baseT.

I hope TIB will have a report on the thing, so we all know what it's like!
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Andrew Weston Message #89934, posted at 13:13, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89933
Unregistered user And what does one do with such a card?
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Lee Johnston Message #89935, posted at 13:26, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89934
Unregistered user You plug into a 100Mb / sec ethernet network.

All it really represents is a price drop over the old 10Mb / sec cards because it's doubtful that you'll see the full potential of the card used (even if the RPC didn't bottleneck it). My PC at work sits on a Gigabit backbone and I rarely flood my 10Mb card.

Note I'm not knocking it, good on Castle for finally doing it. About time.
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
John Hoare Message #89936, posted at 14:12, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89935
Unregistered user Mmmmmm...Insignia... lovely!
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Richard Goodwin Message #89937, posted at 14:36, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89936
Unregistered user I have 10bT in all my home machines, but at work I can push it to 100bT especially as my web server is sitting under my desk so I can really let rip when FTP'ing files to various sites (as well as the RISC OS related ones and my personal sites, I do most of my work development on it). As someone on the newsgroups pointed out however to use the 100bT card at home I'd have to upgrade my hub, which is only 10bT - I've never needed anything faster until now! :)

BTW, one thing I left out of the news item is that the podule version is faster even though it's not using the DMA slot - which of course Castle of all people would get stick about, seeing as the Kinetic stops DMA working (or something, I don't have one).
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Andrew Weston Message #89938, posted at 15:29, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89937
Unregistered user I have 10bT in all my home machines, but at work I can push it to 100bT especially as my web server is sitting under my desk so I can really let rip when FTP'ing files to various sites

First of all <peg on nose>!!

Secondly, isn't FTP over your serial port?
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Peter Naulls Message #89939, posted at 15:34, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89938
Unregistered user No.
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89940, posted at 15:38, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89939
Unregistered user Erm, is there actually much point having a 100Mbps network card considering the speed of the podule bus? Might as well have a 12Mbps one.
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Richard Walker Message #89941, posted at 16:22, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89940
Unregistered user Of course there is a point in a 100 Mbit/sec card! I'm sure there are offices and schools with 100 Mbit/sec hubs, and they won't allow Mr Ris PC User to plug in his computer. Now, with Castle's card, it will work.

OK, so maybe a full-rate connection is above the ability of a Risc PC, but so what? Do you have an ATA-33/66/100 IDE (or SCSI-II etc.) hard disc in your Risc PC? Do you realise that the IDE/SCSI interface can't always keep up? Of course. Does it stop things working? No. Is it better than a much slower interfaces? Yes.

So... why doesn't the card use DMA? Isn't DMA a Good Thing(TM)?
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89942, posted at 17:00, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89941
Unregistered user To guest above... do you really think your podule bus can only do 12Mbit? Silly sod. This 100Mbit card can't be pushed to it's maxiumum 100Mbits from RISC OS, true, but it can get over 50% of the way there, which is a HELL of an improvement over a 10baseT card. 5MB/sec compared to 900K/sec... simply superb! :-)
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
John Duffell Message #89943, posted at 18:10, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89942
Unregistered user Well anyone who's copied stuff over a 10base (unbridged) network probably found that if they try to do more then one thing at once they get lots of collisions. On a 100base network there will be lots more free airtime and so multiple transfers can go on fater than 10base. When 10base came out, not much could give it the full whack, but it just meant everyone could connect to it and have fun at the same time. Podules can do 4MB a sec in normal mode IIRC which is always nice, also the Ether driver will spend less time waiting for the card to send before returning so the computer will feel faster (downloading over serial PPP slows the machine down in part because of this probably not very significant, but hey :) Is the card full duplex?
Finally, FTP is an application layer protocol so you can use it over anything which you can get a reliable stream connection over, which happens to include TCP/IP/PPP/Serial which I presume Andrew Weston is thinking of.
HTH :)
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89944, posted at 20:33, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89943
Unregistered user Who said nothing is happening in the RISCOS world! Lots of positive news this week, keep it up.

I look forward to seeing lots of rather nice looking graphics on websites. Lets have a little insignia competition, no prizes just your name in a twisted font with a lense flare applied on iconbar and the street cred that goes with it :-)
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89945, posted at 23:44, 25/1/2002, in reply to message #89944
Unregistered user Peter - thanks.
John - thanks for the help. I was wondering how Richard could pass information to various sites over an ethernet card.

Andrew
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89946, posted at 10:32, 27/1/2002, in reply to message #89945
Unregistered user Received Insignia yesterday
unfortunately unuseable under RISCOS Select.
It crashes the system when you try to use it.

TAZ
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89947, posted at 13:10, 27/1/2002, in reply to message #89946
Unregistered user "TAZ": Have you emailed us about it (cerilica@cerilica.com)? We are not aware of any specific problems under RISC OS Select, but will need to know full details to help you.

--John Whitington, Author, Insignia.
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89948, posted at 13:11, 27/1/2002, in reply to message #89947
Unregistered user Oh dear. I downloaded the demo, but my hard drive decided to blow up before I got a chance to try it.
Very disappointed it doesn't work under Select - I hope they get it fixed soon because there's no way I'm going back to 4.02.

Robert
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89949, posted at 13:18, 27/1/2002, in reply to message #89948
Unregistered user Richard: One user above can't get it to run. There is no evidence that it does not run on Select per se. If it is the case that it fails to run on select, we will of course fix it in short order.

--John Whitington, Author, Insignia.
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89950, posted at 13:35, 27/1/2002, in reply to message #89949
Unregistered user (sorry - Robert not Richard...)
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89951, posted at 13:59, 27/1/2002, in reply to message #89950
Unregistered user John: Thanks for the clarification - I was typing my message as you posted yours, and therefore didn't see it until it was too late. Sorry about that.
It looks like a very nice package from the screenshots and sample output - I'll be getting my hands on it ASAP.

Guess I'd best wander home and see if I can resurrect this hard drive...

Robert
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
John Hoare Message #89952, posted at 14:22, 27/1/2002, in reply to message #89951
Unregistered user Well, I've posted off my order of Insignia today! :-)
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89953, posted at 15:30, 27/1/2002, in reply to message #89952
Unregistered user John: I apologise unreservedly for not contacting
you first. I have e-mailed you with the details
of the problem which is still occurring. I hope
this will be of help. Keep up the good work supporting
RISC OS.
TAZ
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89954, posted at 16:36, 27/1/2002, in reply to message #89953
Unregistered user TAZ: Oh, nothing to apologise for! This is a public forum..

--John Whitingon
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89955, posted at 22:13, 27/1/2002, in reply to message #89954
Unregistered user So, the new Castle card can potentially do ~5MB/sec over the podule bus - question is, can the Internet stack? :-)
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89956, posted at 01:07, 28/1/2002, in reply to message #89955
Unregistered user Erm I reviewed Insignia for Acornuser on my RISC OS Select RPC and it worked fine. To say it doesn't work on Select isn't very helpful.

And yes, it is great :)

Chris W, drobe.co.uk teaboy
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Richard Goodwin Message #89957, posted at 09:52, 28/1/2002, in reply to message #89956
Unregistered user I downloaded the Insignia demo and it crashes on my normal desktop RO4.02 desktop when it's displaying the text window - a clean reboot got it working, so I presume there's a clash somewhere.

And I only use FTP over TCP/IP. Saying you can't get more than one FTP site is like saying you can't get to more than one Web site!

FTP doesn't do virtual domains on one IP, but each user has a separate login. I just have a different username and password for each and it drops me right in the correct directory for each website (in fact the server's set up so you can't go wandering out of your directory). So, TIB, AA, House of Mabel, etc. etc. are on the same server but with different FTP logins. And of course there are other servers both in the office and in the outside world.
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
John Duffell Message #89958, posted at 12:49, 28/1/2002, in reply to message #89957
Unregistered user The podule bus can't even do 5MB per sec when the cpu is doing nothing else, it can do 4MB per sec in non dma mode (IIRC) and the internet stack doesn't go any particular speed (being software) but the overriding effect is that we have 100baseT which can't possibly be worse than 10, and it's the same price (brand new) so no-one can complain about it not doing the full 9MB per sec or so.
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89959, posted at 13:21, 28/1/2002, in reply to message #89958
Unregistered user The Internet stack is impossibly slow :)

The way I do websites with FTP, is simply put all the sites in /var/www/domainname/host/ and then put a symlink in the owner's home directory to it, and then set the permissions sensibly so only the owner of a website and the various httpds can read it. Much nicer. :)
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Richard Goodwin Message #89960, posted at 15:16, 28/1/2002, in reply to message #89959
Unregistered user There are no shell accounts on the TIB server (apart from mine and Tim's of course) so userdir=webdir is fine - no symlinks required, you just drop straight into the correct virtual domain space.
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Jason Tribbeck Message #89961, posted at 16:41, 28/1/2002, in reply to message #89960
Unregistered user I have pretty much the same system - except shell users have different passwords to FTP users (and POP3 users). Also, shell users have to use SSH to connect.

I also have schemes to allow different users capabilities, so if I don't trust the user, CGI is turned off for all their domains. If they're nice, then it's on.

Pity it's only my brother and me who use the machine ;-)
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #89962, posted at 16:46, 28/1/2002, in reply to message #89961
Unregistered user What the hell have the past 3 comments got to do with this 100baseT card. I really hate people going off subject, especially on places like this.
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
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The Icon Bar: News and features: New releases