Nabble - Hardware - Rescue

Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-26T10:49:42Z

On Nov 26, 2009, at 11:36 AM, Scott Newell <newell@...> wrote:

> Are dead ipods really easy to find for free? That sounds interesting.

Depends on the recycling habits in your area I would imagine, And how
handy the locals are w/r/t replacing 'unreplaceable' batteries..

Lionel
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-26T10:47:07Z

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 10:36:10AM -0600, Scott Newell wrote:

> Are dead ipods really easy to find for free? That sounds interesting.

I understand they are a real problem. People don't know what to do with them,
so they sit around and eventually get dumped in the trash or hauled off
to a recylcing center when someone goes, which in most cases is not very
often.

Try posting a message on local mailing lists, saying you are you looking
for used iPods, dead or alive, for experimental electronic projects. Or
just offer to recycle them.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@... N3OWJ/4X1GM
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-26T10:24:55Z

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 7:46 AM, <gsm@...> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 02:38:22PM +0000, Weird Shanghai wrote:
>
>> they are interesting but not industrial enough, as htey overhead easialy,
>> fall over and die without warning, and generally are useful as play toys
>> only. not industrial applications.
>>
>
> That answers my question.
>
> I had assumed that you were looking for something for your home, or
> a prototype/proof of concept unit.
>
> If you want something for industrial applications, you are talking about
> a very different board than any of the ones suggested.
>

<snip>

I humbly disagree. The three I suggested are. (Soekris, gumstix, and
TS-7800).

-Bob
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-26T08:36:10Z

At 08:04 AM 11/26/2009, gsm@... wrote:

>BTW, if you are really into hardware hacking, you could do most of it with
>dead iPods. I had suggested to someone about converting them into intelligent
>port,

>a bootloader in ROM, RAM, battery and charger and are available by the bin
>in any recylce center.

Are dead ipods really easy to find for free? That sounds interesting.

--
newell N5TNL
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-26T08:03:27Z

On Nov 26, 2009, at 5:12 AM, Jonathan Groll <lists@...> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 04:57:24PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> On Nov 25, 2009, at 2:46 PM, Jonathan Groll <lists@...>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>> While you assumed a HW config, I assumed that:
>>>
>>> HW == ?
>>
>> That's my point.
>>
>> Your rebuttal hinged on an $50K 8 dual processor system w/32 Gigs
>> of RAM being superior to a '$500 Opteron Server'.
>
> Chill, dude.

Honestly, no problem.

> This was not a personal attack or a debate, and I am
> truly sorry it was ever taken as one.

Came across as a quick dismissal, as if my suggestion had no merit.

> I just wanted to know what HW stood for - the best I can come
> up with is hardware and it makes no sense in this context!

You cataloged a system inventory that was based on the maximal config
for the machine in question, when in fact we had no system specs
available from the OP. I contend it did make sense in context, but we
don't have to agree. ;^)

If everyone here agreed all the time, it'd be a lot less interesting
around here.

Again, no problems, never took it personally.

Lionel
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-26T06:46:38Z

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 02:38:22PM +0000, Weird Shanghai wrote:
>they are interesting but not industrial enough, as htey overhead easialy,
>fall over and die without warning, and generally are useful as play toys
>only. not industrial applications.

That answers my question.

I had assumed that you were looking for something for your home, or
a prototype/proof of concept unit.

If you want something for industrial applications, you are talking about
a very different board than any of the ones suggested.

There are specialty boards designed to be embedded in machinery and they
are not common nor cheap.

AFAIK there is someone on this list who actually works on such things,
hopefully he'll respond now that we know what you are looking for.

Besides being "industrial stength", the boards have to be certified for
things that they cheap ones are not even tested, which adds significantly to
the cost.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@... N3OWJ/4X1GM
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-26T06:38:22Z

they are interesting but not industrial enough, as htey overhead easialy,
fall over and die without warning, and generally are useful as play toys
only. not industrial applications.

thanks
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-26T06:04:13Z

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 12:27:59PM +0000, Weird Shanghai wrote:
>all brilliant responses, keep them coming. im looking at all of them so
>far.
>you people have been very helpful thanks.

I don't think you ever answered my proposal of WRT54G-L routers. I'm curious
not for ego, but for information.

They run common easily found linux.

They have a toolchain well known and useable.

They are well documented.

The have an ARM processor, ROM and RAM. The ROM and RAM are not easily
expandable, but they may be with some soldering.

They have 2 ethernet ports, one with a 4 port hub built in.

They have a bunch of processor controlled LED's and several unused GPIO lines.

They have 802.11g wifi.

They are relatively small, use little power and and single supply voltage (5v?).

They are very cheap, if you are in the US, you probably could get all you need
for experimenting/prototyping for free by posting that you are recycling them
into usefull objects.

They lack:

USB ports.

PATA/SATA ports.

Memory card slots.

Display ports.

Drop in memory expansion.

An X86 processor.

More information would be helpful in helping you.

BTW, if you are really into hardware hacking, you could do most of it with
dead iPods. I had suggested to someone about converting them into intelligent
mouse traps, and blogged about it in general when I was blogging, but nothing
ever happened.

I read later that someone does it and was glad to see it.

They have an ARM processor, mass storage, a graphics display, USB client port,
a bootloader in ROM, RAM, battery and charger and are available by the bin
in any recylce center.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@... N3OWJ/4X1GM
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-26T04:27:59Z

all brilliant responses, keep them coming. im looking at all of them so
far.
you people have been very helpful thanks.

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Alan Pope <alan@...> wrote:

> 2009/11/25 Weird Shanghai <weirdshanghai@...>:
> > I am looking to do some embedded work, so single board comptuer, does not
> > have to be
> > intel only. suggestions welcome.
> >
>
> I have a couple of Viglen MPC-Ls at home. They're PCs, not embedded
> but fit in the 'single board' category. They have AMD Geode CPUs and
> come with an 80GB 2.5" hard disk, 6 USB ports, VGA, audio in and out,
> built in speaker and power brick. They consume no more than about 10W
> at full tilt and are x86 compatible.
>
>
> http://www.viglen.co.uk/viglen/Products_Services/Product_Range/Product_file.a
> spx?eCode=XUBUMPCL&Type_Info=Description&Type=Desktops<http://www.viglen.co.uk/viglen/Products_Services/Product_Range/Product_file.a%0Aspx?eCode=XUBUMPCL&Type_Info=Description&Type=Desktops>
>
> We (Ubuntu UK Podcast- http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/ ) got a nice deal
> with Viglen in season 1 episode 11 whereby you can get one for #79
> including UK shipping and Tax. You get a USB keyboard and mouse with
> it, along with a 1GB USB stick, which seems pretty good value for
> money.
>
> Cheers,
> Al.
> _______________________________________________
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-26T03:44:47Z

On 25 Nov 2009, at 19:54, gsm@... wrote:
[...]
> The other thing that I have been wondering following all of this, is
> are
> the programs he plans to run multithreaded? Video compression is not
> AFAIK something that can be done in parallel, so if you figure one
> cpu for
> video and one cpu for audio and the operating system, what do you do
> with
> the rest of them?

I can't speak for FOSS video stuff, but when I'm encoding H.264 with
Quicktime on OSX, it most definitely does use all of the CPUs it can
get. On Linux, I note that pbzip2 will use all cores to compress
files, and git can be told to do some CPU-bound things in parallel.

There's something satisfying about seeing 390-odd% CPU usage in top.
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-26T03:40:19Z

2009/11/25 Weird Shanghai <weirdshanghai@...>:
> I am looking to do some embedded work, so single board comptuer, does not
> have to be
> intel only. suggestions welcome.
>

I have a couple of Viglen MPC-Ls at home. They're PCs, not embedded
but fit in the 'single board' category. They have AMD Geode CPUs and
come with an 80GB 2.5" hard disk, 6 USB ports, VGA, audio in and out,
built in speaker and power brick. They consume no more than about 10W
at full tilt and are x86 compatible.

http://www.viglen.co.uk/viglen/Products_Services/Product_Range/Product_file.a
spx?eCode=XUBUMPCL&Type_Info=Description&Type=Desktops

We (Ubuntu UK Podcast- http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/ ) got a nice deal
with Viglen in season 1 episode 11 whereby you can get one for #79
including UK shipping and Tax. You get a USB keyboard and mouse with
it, along with a 1GB USB stick, which seems pretty good value for
money.

Cheers,
Al.
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-26T02:14:59Z

John Floren wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Weird Shanghai
> <weirdshanghai@...> wrote:
>> I am looking to do some embedded work, so single board comptuer, does not
>> have to be
>> intel only. B suggestions welcome.
>>
> $150 gets you the Beagle Board; it's a fast little ARM machine with
> on-board video, 128 MB of RAM, and a multitude of I/O options (rs232,
> i2c, JTAG, s-video, DVI, audio in and out). I haven't had a lot of
> time to play with the one I picked up but hopefully soon...
> The biggest downside is that it doesn't have on-board ethernet.
> However, USB ethernet adapters are a dime a dozen and pretty
> well-supported these days as I understand it.

On top of that:
- IGEPv2 platform:
http://www.igep-platform.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46&Itemid=55
Comes with Ethernet, 140-145.
- Hawkboard platform: http://hawkboard.wordpress.com/
Again, has ethernet :) No price yet, but they are aiming at 80$ approx.
- Always Innovating Touch Book:
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm
- Openpandora: http://www.openpandora.org/
- OpenRD-Client & OpenRD-Base
- ...

Once you start looking at ARM OMAP based boards & platforms, you'll find
that there's a lot out there... ;)
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-26T02:12:56Z

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 04:57:24PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> On Nov 25, 2009, at 2:46 PM, Jonathan Groll <lists@...> wrote:
>
>>> While you assumed a HW config, I assumed that:
>>
>> HW == ?
>
> That's my point.
>
> Your rebuttal hinged on an $50K 8 dual processor system w/32 Gigs of RAM
> being superior to a '$500 Opteron Server'.

Chill, dude. This was not a personal attack or a debate, and I am
truly sorry it was ever taken as one.

I just wanted to know what HW stood for - the best I can come
up with is hardware and it makes no sense in this context!

Cheers,
Jonathan
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+)

2009-11-25T23:05:13Z

blue@... writes:

> Solaris fits well on this system... the fans slow down shortly after
>Solaris has booted, I'm sure Linux won't do that without a lot of
>tweaking :P . The thing is that this machine is owned privately and
>isn't required to be stable, on 24/7, serve web pages, etc. There's no
>reason why Linux shouldn't be able to run on this machine. Solaris isn't
>fully compliant with Linux... there's a lot of software available for
>Linux which won't run on Solaris without lots of magic :P . So far,
>Solaris on this machine has been really good at generating fractals :) .
>The JRE supplied with Solaris is very very efficient, which is great
>because I actually know Java quite well (don't kill me pleeeeease).

Just like to point out that I was a hardcore BSD purist for over a
decade, but running Solaris on nice Sun gear (SS1000, originally)
made me a convert. I now run BSD on the desktop and small servers
(firewalls, etc.) but Solaris on all my heavy-lifting servers.

Give it a little more time. You might grow to like it.

------ David Fischer ------- dave@... ------- http://www.cca.org ------
----------------- Young-goon! The vending machine says hi! ----------------
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T19:16:44Z

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 01:46:53AM +0200, Aaron Scheiner wrote:

> Lionel Petersen : "Have you considered selling the Sun box and buying an
> x86 box that's better suited to your needs?"
> I must admit I have considered selling it, I could make a fair profit
> out of it... however... the idea of having a massive server lying around
> is pretty cool... I've always liked Sun too... owning some of their
> hardware is quite an honour I think.

Of course, you could sell this, buy a really powerfull PC, then spend
the rest on a still very spiffy Sun that is a year or two older, and
maybe a bit smaller.
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T15:55:26Z

On Nov 25, 2009, at 6:46 PM, Aaron Scheiner <blue@...> wrote:

> So... on the to-do list for later is :
> Try pkgsrc on Solaris.
> Try a Linux Zone.
> Try install46.iso snapshot.
> Try building a custom kernel with a patch supplied by Debian devs and
> boot it.

Fantastic! Do keep us updated on what does and does not work...

Lionel
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T15:46:53Z

Wow, you people don't waste time.

MJ Turner : "some details of your Debian problems to the
debian-sparc mailing list."
Already done so :) .

MJ Turner : "David S. Miller (the kernel hacker responsible
for SPARC) is fairly active there and perhaps he can help."
Thanks :) I e-mailed Meelis Roos and he also mentioned David Miller.

Meelis Roos : "console bugs were just fixed for 480R/V880/"
The bug's behaviour changes depending on the console specified, however
the error is : "Kernel unaligned access at TPC[46d24c]"

Sevan / Venture37 : "Try a snapshot
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/sparc64/install46.iso"
*downloading* thanks :) .

Lionel Petersen : "Have you considered selling the Sun box and buying an
x86 box that's better suited to your needs?"
I must admit I have considered selling it, I could make a fair profit
out of it... however... the idea of having a massive server lying around
is pretty cool... I've always liked Sun too... owning some of their
hardware is quite an honour I think.

Jerry K : "I am at a loss as to why Solaris or OpenSolaris wouldn't
be the ideal OS for this system."
Solaris fits well on this system... the fans slow down shortly after
Solaris has booted, I'm sure Linux won't do that without a lot of
tweaking :P . The thing is that this machine is owned privately and
isn't required to be stable, on 24/7, serve web pages, etc. There's no
reason why Linux shouldn't be able to run on this machine. Solaris isn't
fully compliant with Linux... there's a lot of software available for
Linux which won't run on Solaris without lots of magic :P . So far,
Solaris on this machine has been really good at generating fractals :) .
The JRE supplied with Solaris is very very efficient, which is great
because I actually know Java quite well (don't kill me pleeeeease).

Jonathan Katz : "The OP (Aaron?) suggested he wanted a platform for
ffmpeg and other fun things to (I assume) transcode video."
I just want to put it to good use really. I'm involved in the video
world and we often film stuff in HD... then we get people who want to
see the footage but don't have fast enough machines to watch it with, so
I generate proxy files (files of a lower resolution and lower bitrate).
I figured that would be a particularly good task for a machine of this
size (virtual size). It'd probably also be good for adjusting/grading
the colo(u)r and contrast of footage. But yeah... fun stuff in general
is good too... :) .

Jonathan Katz : "However, after playing around with blastwave, there
does seem to be a pre-compiled copy of ffmpeg, but not blender."
Blastwave is fantastic! Wow, when I first tried typing commands in
Solaris... oh boy... no wget, no nano, no tab. It was quite frustrating.
Blastwave solved all that fairly quickly. Blastwave's version of FFMPEG
is quite old and isn't very useful, it lacks a lot of the codecs that
make FFMPEG useful.... something that's really easy to compile on Ubuntu
is angry on Solaris. I am thankful to Blastwave for making Solaris a lot
friendlier.

William Enestvedt : "Knowing that our flagship PROD boxes are
being discussed on the Rescue list -- again -- chokes me up a little."
Will... if it helps, the people who sold me these machines thought it
was some kind of filing cabinet and wanted to melt it down for scrap.

and wow... a Linux Zone... this could be the answer! Thanks Will! :D
Virtual machines had crossed my mind but this is obviously far more
efficient.

Ray Arachelian : "Only ones I've seen
mentioned was for opensolaris on x86."
...ai :( . Although, they don't seem to mention x86 as a requirement.

Joshua Boyd : "It is rare that you will miss the windows codecs in my
experience."
I certainly won't... I'm mainly interested in MPEG2 and H264.

Sevan : "www.pkgsrc.org"
pkgsrv is available for Solaris but it does battle building some
packages... it's definitely on my to-try list :P . Thanks.

Lionel Petersen : "B) the OP could not find pre-compiled versions of
those apps for Solaris"
He couldn't, at least not anything worthwhile.

"C) the OP was either unable or unsuccessful at porting those apps to
Solaris"
It's a mission ;) , as you can see from Chris Mile's article... and
that's quite old now. It also doesn't include a few tasty
libraries/codecs.

"D) that the problem the OP was trying to solve was to run specific
apps, not to find an excuse to run 'something' on the server"
Well... got jobs to process... got a big machine...

MPEG2 is quite a complex codec... H264 even more so... it can take over
a day (+/- 14 hours) for my Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2GHz with 4GBs
of RAM to process a 1 hour HD file.

Jonathan Groll : "Still, we do rescue these things, don't we
all?"
...poor William Enestvedt.

Goeff : "Video compression is not AFAIK something that can be done in
parallel..."

There are different ways of handling it... if it's an existing file and
not a stream, you can divide the file up into slices and give each slice
to a separate core. The other method, for streams, which manages to
max-out my 8-core mac is to give a group-of-pictures to each core. So
for long GOP MPEG2 you'd give each processor 12 frames at a time to
process. One of the processors will generally be used for audio.

Thanks for your help everyone... what a great thread. It's like opening
up the mail and not finding bills :) .

So... on the to-do list for later is :
Try pkgsrc on Solaris.
Try a Linux Zone.
Try install46.iso snapshot.
Try building a custom kernel with a patch supplied by Debian devs and
boot it.

Aaron
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T14:05:05Z

On Nov 25, 2009, at 2:46 PM, Jonathan Groll <lists@...> wrote:

> I'm surprised that no mention was made that an
> Atom-class machine can knock the socks off a ~3KW Sun server in terms
> of power consumption costs! Still, we do rescue these things, don't we
> all?

SGI makes pedestal systems with dozens of dual-core Atom CPUs as super-
duper compute solutions.

We rescue these machines - absolutely - I've got a ton of them.
Literally. Of course, being early to the Rescue 'game' I'm full-up in
UltraSPARC I/II era machines...

Lionel
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T13:57:24Z

On Nov 25, 2009, at 2:46 PM, Jonathan Groll <lists@...> wrote:

>> While you assumed a HW config, I assumed that:
>
> HW == ?

That's my point.

Your rebuttal hinged on an $50K 8 dual processor system w/32 Gigs of
RAM being superior to a '$500 Opteron Server'.

Lionel
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-25T12:31:12Z

On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:06:45 +0000
Weird Shanghai <weirdshanghai@...> wrote:

> I am looking to do some embedded work, so single board comptuer
ALIX. It is a PeeCee SBC based on a 500 MHz AMD Geode LX800 in various
versions and sizes from 100 mm x 160 mm up to miniITX.
http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm
--

tsch|_,
Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T12:11:23Z

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 09:54:33PM +0200, gsm@... wrote:

> The other thing that I have been wondering following all of this, is are
> the programs he plans to run multithreaded? Video compression is not
> AFAIK something that can be done in parallel, so if you figure one cpu for
> video and one cpu for audio and the operating system, what do you do with
> the rest of them?

Video processing can be parallel. Right off the bat, You can have one
thread for IO, one thread for decompression, and one thread for
compression. Beyond that, other areas that could be easily threaded (I
believe) would be motion estimation on the encoder, and the DCT and iDCT
stages on the encoder and decoder, as well as color space conversion (if
needed). As far as I know it has only been recently that this level of
threading would be reasonable, so I'm not aware of all that many
programs that both to do more than simply pipeline a few stages, like
IO, encode, and decode into a very small number of not evenly balanced
threads.

I believe that blender rendering is supposed to scale well over multiple
CPUs. I don't know about the physics or the rest of blender though.

In ffmpeg, threading is supported in theory, but how well depends on the
input and output codecs. For instannce, h264 will use thread for decode
only IF the file has multiple slices, and I believe that many codecs
don't support threading.
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T11:54:33Z

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 09:46:25PM +0200, Jonathan Groll wrote:
> All good points, modern Intel/AMD hardware is outstanding value for
> price/performance and I'm surprised that no mention was made that an
> Atom-class machine can knock the socks off a ~3KW Sun server in terms
> of power consumption costs! Still, we do rescue these things, don't we
> all?

The other thing that I have been wondering following all of this, is are
the programs he plans to run multithreaded? Video compression is not
AFAIK something that can be done in parallel, so if you figure one cpu for
video and one cpu for audio and the operating system, what do you do with
the rest of them?

I understand that if you have 24 cpus, you can do more than one, maybe
as many as 20 or so different files at once, but when do you run out
of I/O or disk head/RAM contention gets in the way?

Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@... N3OWJ/4X1GM
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T11:51:15Z

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 02:47:45PM -0500, Joshua Boyd wrote:
>On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 09:46:25PM +0200, Jonathan Groll wrote:
>
>> of power consumption costs! Still, we do rescue these things, don't we
>> all?
>
>Do we rescue these things? Maybe that E250 was looking forward to life
>out to pasture rather than being chained up in a dismal basement for
>another generation of drudge work. ;)

Never mind those poor FrankenSuns and olde suns with lobotomized PROM
chips!

Cheers,
Jonathan
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T11:47:45Z

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 09:46:25PM +0200, Jonathan Groll wrote:

> of power consumption costs! Still, we do rescue these things, don't we
> all?

Do we rescue these things? Maybe that E250 was looking forward to life
out to pasture rather than being chained up in a dismal basement for
another generation of drudge work. ;)
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T11:46:25Z

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 01:40:43PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
<snip>
> While you assumed a HW config, I assumed that:

HW == ?

>
> A) the OP had a good reason to want to run specific apps
>
> B) the OP could not find pre-compiled versions of those apps for Solaris
>
> C) the OP was either unable or unsuccessful at porting those apps to
> Solaris
>
> D) that the problem the OP was trying to solve was to run specific apps,
> not to find an excuse to run 'something' on the server
>
> I could be wildly off in my assumptions, and so could you - either way,
> my suggestion was sound, if my dollar amount/budget was off. Those apps
> running unoptimized on the hardware he has may actually run slower than
> similar-era Intel/AMD hardware that is running optimized versions of the
> apps.

All good points, modern Intel/AMD hardware is outstanding value for
price/performance and I'm surprised that no mention was made that an
Atom-class machine can knock the socks off a ~3KW Sun server in terms
of power consumption costs! Still, we do rescue these things, don't we
all?

Regards,
Jonathan
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-25T11:35:50Z

On Nov 25, 2009, at 2:12 PM, Sevan / Venture37 <venture37@...>
wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

'zactly - thanks!

Lionel
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T11:18:28Z

another option would be to stick with *Solaris & use pkgsrc to build the
software you require with ease.

www.pkgsrc.org

Sevan / Venture37
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-25T11:12:32Z

On 25/11/2009 18:48, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> On Nov 25, 2009, at 11:06 AM, Weird Shanghai
> <weirdshanghai@...> wrote:
>
>> I am looking to do some embedded work, so single board comptuer, does not
>> have to be
>> intel only. suggestions welcome.
>
> What about those wall-wart servers? I forget the name, but there were
> Apple Airport Express-looking servers that hung off a 120v power plug
> and had USB & Ethernet (maybe WiFi also), selling in the $100-150 range...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-25T10:48:05Z

On Nov 25, 2009, at 11:06 AM, Weird Shanghai <weirdshanghai@...
> wrote:

> I am looking to do some embedded work, so single board comptuer,
> does not
> have to be
> intel only. suggestions welcome.

What about those wall-wart servers? I forget the name, but there were
Apple Airport Express-looking servers that hung off a 120v power plug
and had USB & Ethernet (maybe WiFi also), selling in the $100-150
range...

Really depends on the application, though. Old laptops might be best
(thinking of fellow that made kiosks out of old Sparcbook 3gx)...

Lionel
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Re: What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

2009-11-25T10:40:43Z

On Nov 25, 2009, at 9:49 AM, Jonathan Groll <lists@...> wrote:

> A Sun Fire V890 is a fine looking hammer -> I really don't think a
> $500 opteron machine can compete with 8 X dual core US IV+ processors
> and ~32GiB RAM (and a machine that cost about $50000 in 2004).

I wasn't aware the OP had a maximal system, that would increase the
amount of money a sale could generate... I can do 8 real cores at 2.4
GHz (or better) with 32 gigs of RAM and 4x JBOD drives NEW for $2K w/
multi-year warranty.

While you assumed a HW config, I assumed that:

A) the OP had a good reason to want to run specific apps

B) the OP could not find pre-compiled versions of those apps for Solaris

C) the OP was either unable or unsuccessful at porting those apps to
Solaris

D) that the problem the OP was trying to solve was to run specific
apps, not to find an excuse to run 'something' on the server

I could be wildly off in my assumptions, and so could you - either
way, my suggestion was sound, if my dollar amount/budget was off.
Those apps running unoptimized on the hardware he has may actually run
slower than similar-era Intel/AMD hardware that is running optimized
versions of the apps.

Lionel
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-25T10:27:28Z

sheeva plug, openrd & routerstation pro are worth a look
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-25T10:24:55Z

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 05:07:29PM +0000, Weird Shanghai wrote:
> now thats what i am talking about. something cheap and plentiful for
> dev work.. anyone use one? any more suggestions?

The dev boards I've used have either not been large enough for linux, or
they've been too expensive. I've never used this one. I've thought of
it, but it isn't quite right for the main project I keep coming back to,
which needs to be able to drive a CD burner, preferably not by USB.
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-25T09:44:15Z

so far the ATMEL AVR32's look great. cheap, loads of IO and supported dev
environment.
i have a few uclinux 68ez328 dragonball linux sticks, but they seem
abondoned. www.lineo.com
is toast, uclinux.org is 8 years out of date, the dev kit will only compile
on an 7 year old os
and there is no updates for it. so i look for something cheap and easy to
play with.
avr32 so far looks cool.
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-25T09:39:01Z

Oh also, old WYSE winterms can run linux, be acquired under $20.

PCMCIA, USB, VGA, take PC133 SODIMMs for ram, have parallel, serial, X86
CPUs, and real low power draw and footprint.

Great values, especially for display-driving SBCs.

And you can use USB-Video interfaces on the others I mentioned, depending.

The Sharp Zaurus is also worth a look if you want something more PDA like.

-- Ian Finder

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Ian Finder <ian.finder@...> wrote:

> I've used Gumstix, Linksys NSLU2, and old Compaq iPAQs.
>
> All run linux, all are ARM and reasonably fast and expandable.
>
> An nslu2 can be had for around $40.
>
> Overclockable to 266mhz, USB host, 32 mb ram. More than enough.
>
> Gumstix are even beefier in specs. Check them out.
>
> If you still need suggestions, my colleagues have even more SBCs, I can see
> what they're using.
>
> -- Ian F
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Weird Shanghai <
> weirdshanghai@...> wrote:
>
>> now thats what i am talking about. something cheap and plentiful for
>> dev work.. anyone use one? any more suggestions?
>>
>> thanks
>> keep them coming.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Joshua Boyd <jdboyd@...> wrote:
>>
>> > On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 09:29:59AM -0700, Robert Darlington wrote:
>> > > Soekris
>> > > gumstix
>> > > I hear good things about the Technologic TS-7800
>> >
>> > For lower price, the ATNGW100-ND is $90, comes with linux (and the tools
>> > to reload it), and has 32MB RAM, SD slot, ethernet, and many IO options,
>> > like I2C, SPI, GPIO, build in LCD contoller, etc.
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>> _______________________________________________
>> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Ian Finder
> 224.659.4204
> ian.finder@...
> finder | solutions - IT on your terms
>

--
Ian Finder
224.659.4204
ian.finder@...
finder | solutions - IT on your terms
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Re: Small Cheap Linux Board??

2009-11-25T09:36:38Z

I've used Gumstix, Linksys NSLU2, and old Compaq iPAQs.

All run linux, all are ARM and reasonably fast and expandable.

An nslu2 can be had for around $40.

Overclockable to 266mhz, USB host, 32 mb ram. More than enough.

Gumstix are even beefier in specs. Check them out.

If you still need suggestions, my colleagues have even more SBCs, I can see
what they're using.

-- Ian F

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Weird Shanghai <weirdshanghai@...
> wrote:

> now thats what i am talking about. something cheap and plentiful for
> dev work.. anyone use one? any more suggestions?
>
> thanks
> keep them coming.
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Joshua Boyd <jdboyd@...> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 09:29:59AM -0700, Robert Darlington wrote:
> > > Soekris
> > > gumstix
> > > I hear good things about the Technologic TS-7800
> >
> > For lower price, the ATNGW100-ND is $90, comes with linux (and the tools
> > to reload it), and has 32MB RAM, SD slot, ethernet, and many IO options,
> > like I2C, SPI, GPIO, build in LCD contoller, etc.
> > _______________________________________________
> > rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>

--
Ian Finder
224.659.4204
ian.finder@...
finder | solutions - IT on your terms
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