Yes, but whose hand has he up him?
Anyway, just got back from the meeting. There were about 30 people there, a good turnout considering the short notice.
Ross Vumbaca had his development system on show. He had a G3-SE with several uninteresting IDE devices, an elderly PCI graphics card and a SCSI adaptor. The output of the gfx card was connected to a large Sony flat panel screen so everyone could see it while sitting down. When asked, Ross admitted that he didn't have a spare AGP card to plug into it (see below).
As expected, there was only Linux available to demonstrate the hardware; however, the board did have the new BIOS fitted and was able to boot from an ethernet LAN connection. The boot speed was consequently limited by the ethernet transfer speed, and the speed of the laptop at the other end of the cable.
Ross gave us a walkthrough of the board layout, followed by the demonstration itself. Ross has a personal stripped-down Linux kernel which he uses, so only a few functions could be shown. However, the demonstration was of the PPC hardware, not of Linux.
After some Q&A, we had a chance to play with the machine, take photos, etc. This machine had a heat sink on the CPU, but no fan on it.
To try out the AGP gfx card support, we plugged in a G400 DH Matrox card, but there was no video from it. It appears that the Matrox support is not completed.
Later we had a phone call from Alan Redhouse, sounding very 7 o'clock-on-Sunday-morning. But he was able to answer a number of ticklish questions from the audience.
To sum up, we have seen the G3-SE working. Big deal, some might say, but at least we are further along now. Looking forward to AOS4 being released.
tony
