[GRLUG] Single board computers

[Tim Schmidt]

On 6/10/06, Nick Reid <nik at yakko.cs.wmich.edu> wrote:
> so what have you been able to get this thing to do. it sounds
> interesting that its using component laptop parts to make this happen.
> the mips-like cpu seems like you'd have issues getting linux compiled on
> it.

It's a wireless router that happens to run Linux out of the box...  By
default, it has your typical busybox utilities, a fairly stripped-down
kernel, and a lightweight samba installed.  When it boots, it creates
/ as a filesystem in ram and unpacks a bunh of gzipped tar files
stored in the flash to /...  out of about 6Mb of flash, 3.5 or so is
free.

Some folks at MIT have modified the stock firmware to make it suitable
for a wireless mesh node:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/roofnet/doku.php?id=wgt634u

OpenWRT has been ported to it:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Netgear/WGT634U

And most interestingly...  Debian Etch is running just spiffily on it:
http://www.cyrius.com/debian/bcm947xx/wgt634u/

The little beast is capable of grabbing it's kernel from a tftp
server, so testing new configurations is easy and safe...

So long as you can deal with 200Mhz and 32Mb of ram, and your driver
can be compiled under MIPS (which really shouldn't be a problem), it
can use any mini-pci or USB device...  hubs included.  So it's
reasonably expandable.  If it came in a 64Mb version, I'd consider
snapping up some kontron SATA-2Rs for my project instead of looking at
whole new SBCs.  I'd like gigabit ethernet too, but there's only so
much someone can ask for ;)

--tim