Pegasos
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The present article is about the Pegasos computer platform. Pegasos may also refer to the horse Pegasus from Greek mythology.
Pegasos is a MicroATX motherboard powered by a PowerPC G3/G4 microprocessor, featuring 3 PCI slots, 1 AGP slot, onboard 1 Gbit/s Ethernet, USB, DDR, AC97 sound, and FireWire. Like the Apple Macintosh counterparts, it has the Open Firmware system.
There are two versions of the system: The Pegasos I and the Pegasos II.
The Pegasos I only supports the G3 CPU, has only 100 Mbit/s Ethernet and uses simple SDRAM. It suffers from a hardware bug in the MAI Logic ArticiaS Northbridge. To fix this later versions came with a small additional board called "April".
The Pegasos II fixes this problem by using a Marvell northbridge.
The G3 CPU boards do not require a cooling fan - it's called "cool computing". The currently made G4 boards come with a fan. However it is said that it isn't absolutely required and is only there because suitable heat sinks couldn't be acquired in time for production.
The Pegasos is made by Genesi S.ŕ.r.l, a Luxembourg based company in cooperation with the german bplan GmbH.
The Pegasos ships with the MorphOS operating system, which is capable of running most legacy Commodore Amiga applications (as long as they use the OS functions and don't access the hardware directly) as well as a growing number of native applications. Several Linux distros including Debian GNU/Linux and Gentoo Linux are also available for the Pegasos.
An OpenBSD port was undertaken but cashflow problems at Genesi and the need to respect the NDA of a Pegasos component supplier brought the project to a halt. Links to all available comments on this situation can be found at the Phoenix Developer Consortium OpenBSD Wrap-up (http://phinixi.com/tiki-index.php?page=OpenBSD-Peg+Wrap-up) page.
There is also an effort to get NetBSD running on the Pegasos. The current state is that a kernel from the ofppc port basically runs. Further work is required to make it usable. [1] (http://mail-index.NetBSD.org/port-ofppc/2004/12/)
The Pegasos is listed in IBM's Global Solutions Directory (http://sdoprodc1.austin.ibm.com/solutions/isv/igssg.nsf/FastSolutions/86256B7B0003EBBF86256E28007693B4) and as a Motorola MPC7447A Evaluation/Development System (http://e-www.motorola.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC7447A#tools). Genesi was a Gold Sponsor (http://e-www.motorola.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?nodeId=02VS0llCc5pzMP55131805#gold) at Motorola/Freescale Smart Networks Developer Forum 2004.
External links
- PegasosPPC (http://www.pegasosppc.com/)
- MorphOS (http://www.morphosppc.com/)
- Genesi (http://www.genesi.lu/)cs:Pegasos (počítač)