[OT] But important to me. Appropiate Mailing Lists ??

[jdow]

From: "William Case" <billlinux at rogers.com>

> Thanks jdow;
> 
> You have helped somewhat.
> 
> On Sun, 2006-16-04 at 16:03 -0700, jdow wrote:
>> From: "William Case" <billlinux at rogers.com>
>> 
>> > Hi;
>> > 
>> > I am moving into a post newbie stage of my Linux experience and I would
>> > like to find a friendly mailing list that will happily handle Linux
>> > kernel, my operating system questions and an occasional 'C' question.
>> > Some questions would be fairly deep others would reveal me as a newbie.
> 
>> > Please I am not asking for answers to the above example questions here.
>> > 
>> > I am asking, has anyone on this Fedora list had a good experience with a
>> > list that helped newbies move to being a guru?  A newru, or perhaps a
>> > gubie, list?
>> > 
>> > All suggestions of such lists you might have will be tried.
>> 
>> Lists? I fear you have two choices for those sorts of question, newsgroups,
> 
> I have checked out some newsgroups and googled for days.  I was hoping I
> could find someone who has had a good experience with a site, forum,
> newsgroup or mailing list.

Getting lucky does help. Learning to ask the right questions also helps.
OLD personal computers are a way to figure out answers you might want. You
can tinker with them better.

>> a trip to college for study, 
> Hate school, too old for school, too stubborn for school and have always
> been able to learn much much faster on my own.

Survey Amazon for text books. It's expensive. But....

>> or a lot of Googling coupled with a boatload
>> of reading. 
> 
> I was trying to cut down on the googling, but love reading anything.

"Standards" is a nice keyword. Modify it with keywords that may apply.

Obtaining the books can be problematic. (What Amazon does not have might
be at OpAmp Technical Books, http://www.opamp.com/. Other such utter
candy stores do exist.)

>> The questions above seem to indicate a lack of some very basic
>> knowledge needed before you can ask somewhat more sensible questions.
> 
> Don't mistake shortcuts used for an example for stupidity.

OK.

>>  If you understand boolean logic, 
> 
> Yes, I understand boolean logic -- what I have forgotten I can brush up
> on.
> 
>> how addresses are parsed
> 
> I suspect that that was what I was asking about.  I know port numbers
> have special designations so that the CPU or other devices know where
> they are.  (It is more complicated than that but you get the idea)

The unfortunate thing here is that the PCI bus standard is expensive.
You might glean something by reading the kernel code partaining to the
PCI bus and accessing it.

>> , and that there are
>> standards organizations such as VESA at work the answers to the first
>> question is obvious as are the answers to the next batch. 
> 
> Thank you, forgot about VESA.

de nada

>> (The venerable
>> old 68000 CPU might help understand the answers to the second batch. It's
>> command set was very "regular". It's manuals were relatively easy to
>> understand, as well.) And interpreters simply add an execution step and
>> remove the linkage step.
> 
> It is more complex than that, I am sure.

The registers can be thought of as tiny customized chunks of memory that
have their own internal addresses within the CPUs. Their access is coded
within the instructions and the "microcode" that might exist to interpret
those instructions. The 68000 made it particularly "obvious".

The interpreters are very simple, too. Check out a copy of the source for
the VERY old "TinyBASIC" interpreter. Or find one of the copies for the
disassembled and recreated source for Commodore BASIC. It takes time to
get a handle on it. But you can see how it parses and executes rather
than parses and translates. A BASIC interpreter sometimes includes specific
lexical passes, translation to an internal code representation, and
execution, via translation, of the internal code representation. Often the
translation is a jump table. (I learned by creating my own source for an
HP BASIC interpreter that was handy. Darned fine code in it, too.)

>> (Life was easier for bootstrapping yourself in the days of the old Z-80
>> or 6502. The Amiga, even, was approachable without much base knowledge.
>> Reading some old texts about these machines in depth might help to give
>> you a grasp on what is going on inside in some detail.)
>> 
>> {^_^}
> Done that kind of thing a couple of years ago.
> 
> I really appreciate the time you took to reply.
> 
> I have two manuals on Pentium architecture (both of which
> I have read from cover to cover) and I have the Intel Manuals, IA-32
> Architecture Software Developer's Manual vol I, II and III as well as
> all the data sheets for my motherboard and chipset.  I wanted someplace
> where I can get help translating the occasional Greek in those manuals
> and maybe an explanation now and then why something is done one way
> rather than another.  It's not just enough to absorb information.
> Discussing it clarifies and fixes new things in the mind -- or at least
> in mine.

Simpler CPUs are easier to grasp at first. That's why textbooks with their
simplifications can help. Lacking textbooks the 68000 manuals, hardware
and software, can illuminate a LOT of important concepts.

{^_^}