Well, there you are. Happy as a pig as you just got your Transputer system running – be it a single CPU AVM-B1 card or a huge cluster you nicked from your local university…
After you indulged yourself for hours in the endless space of Mandelbrot fractals you might think that this can’t be everything… and being a real geek man, the next thing which pops into your mind will probably “Is there be a Linux port for this?”.
Bad news: No, there’s no Linux port for this – and I doubt there ever will be.
Good news: There’s Helios, the UNIX’ish OS which was specifically made for Transputers… and today it’s free!
Wikipedia has a pretty good historical intro to Helios while I cannot second their way of spelling it “HeliOS“.
Perihelion -the creator of the OS- never used this notation. It’s “Helios”, no inter-caps. Period!
Mike did a wonderful job (again) to save all available documentation for the posterity (us, that is) on his page over here. If the manual “The Helios Parallel Operating System”, which is available there, still leaves you with open questions you might consider porting Linux yourself in about a week or so 😉
Anyhow, this page’s purpose is to kick-start you without reading the above 636 pages manual, so you can start fooling around with Helios as quick as possible. So here are the posts I’ve wrote so far to set up your Helios system step-by-step: