Curious (Student)

[Olivier Gautherot]

Hi Matthew!

Welcome to the club :-) The only thing I can tell you is that you
made a good choice for your new OS - definitely a lot of good stuff
to learn... and valuable experience if one day you choose to look
at something else but I know I should not talk about competition ;-)
The community is great too - that's another asset of the project.


> The other programming task I can get done given a set of standards, but
> the  one question that I have not been so far been able to answer due
> to the lack  of financial resources is: Is there a general motherboard
> architechture, you  see if I knew the specfic address of the DMA, IO
> Controller etc, I would be  in a position to write low level code to
> operate with high level code.

Well, if you (or a neighbour) have an old PC that you're about to scrap,
it is probably a good candidate for a test machine. BSD will run on
old architectures (Pentium and before) - although you should not expect
to run the latest KDE or 3D flight simulator on it ;-) If you're
interested in networking, you can run a more than decent firewall, though.


> So I am requestion the oportunity to help further develpe this project
> in  return for access to highly technical data; please note I already
> know a  myriad of programming languages including, C, C++, C#, Fortran,
> Basic,  Pascal, J, J++, Java , D, Visual Basic, Assembly etc. I also
> possess many  other technical skills and knowledge. Furthermore I
> possess an Associate  Degree in Electrical Engineering, and various CXC
> passes especially in  Mathematics, Physics, Engilsh, Electronics.

Sounds like you're going to have fun with the 11000+ packages available!
Have a look at the existing software and see what you're interested in.
All packages have a TODO list so you'll have plenty to occupy your free
time and more. I would suggest to install the system on a machine and
play around to start with. Just reading the handbook should keep you
busy for a few days.

Hope to see your name soon in the "New committers" list!

Cheers
  Olivier