[GRLUG] Single board computers

[Scott Zahn]

For SBC boards, the Soekris and Gumstix boards look cool.  I haven't had a 
real reason to get a soekris yet, but as soon as I find one, you can be 
sure I'll be buying one.

On Sat, 10 Jun 2006, Tim Schmidt wrote:

> 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
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