[Leaplist] Small Inexpensive Network appliance

[Mark W. Alexander]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 04:16:34PM -0400, Brian Rose wrote:
> patrick wrote:
> AVR are older 8 and 16 bit chips. The AVR32, which is used in the NGW100 
> is a full-on CPU allowing protected memory. This is a small system on a 
> chip that has many things built in.
> 
> Of course there are ARM chips that do the same thing, but most of thos 
> development kits cost around $300-800 or more.

For about the same price as the AVR kit, you can get retail NSLU2 in a nice,
finished form factor:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2
 http://www.nslu2-linux.org/

Mine's running NFS, Sambe, mt-daapd, laptop backups and a home-grown web UI for
contolling my Roku Soundbrige. As for open, I spent yesterday building mt-daapd
from svn so I can share lossless FLAC encoded audio over DAAP (transparent
transcoding for iTunes, for the brand-conscious out there ;)

That's building as in autoconf, automake, gcc, etc., etc... No, no "devkit" or
"SDK" required.

Yes, it took a while ;) But then compiling multimedia libraries and
dependencies generally do. 

On a related note, I'm really exited about the ARM EABI work
(http://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort, is a good starting point). In my copious
spare time (ahahaha!) I flashed an EABI kernel on my Zaurus 3100 and managed
to bootstrap pure Debian. First, the performance increase is substantial.
Second, thousands of stock Debian packages are now at my fingertips. No more
questing for a Zaurus package to ______! Everything is just an apt away :) I
have a nice, stock IceWM palmtop.  Someday, I'll get Debian EABI on the
NSLU2... The only thing stopping me is that I don't want to be without all the
services it provides while I hack it.

Then I can 'apt-get' video codecs for mt-daapd!

mwa
-- 
Mark W. Alexander
slash at dotnetslash.net

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