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When it is in stock, the cubieboard is only $49. That's more than the R-Pi but the same price as the original VIA APC and with more RAM and CPU, and substantially less than these new VIA APCs.

If you don't need video the best buy I know of is the Pogoplug Series 4. The Series 4 pogoplug is $40 and has 1xUSB2, 2xUSB3, and SATA along with 1xGigE. I run Debian on my Dockstar, which has 4xUSB2 &one is a male mini plug but that's not useless.

However, IMO there is little reason for most devices that dinky to have disk that fast. I can hardly use data faster than I can get it across USB2. So for my money, the best buy is the Dockstar; they're $13 new on Amazon and even cheaper if you scrounge, they have poor memory but a decent processor, you can have JTAG if you need it, they run Debian Lenny or Squeeze nicely, and they have 4xUSB2 and 1xGigE. I believe you can even get a small amount of GPIO if you strain. In terms of price-performance ratio, I don't know of anything better than a dockstar, which is tiny even in its case.

They could go a little smaller

If you fancy some DIY, there are several good chipsets for media players: Intel CE4200 (i386) and several Marvell ones (ARM) just to name a few. They normally handle 720/1080p, stereo/5.1 audio and yes, they all run Linux :-)
I personally like Marvell Armada chipsets (have been working on them in the past) and they're also used in some plug computers, which is something you may like to try (double-check the specs though).

Once you've got your HW decoder, you can generally run gstreamer on it. You may need to fine-tune gstreamer for the particular chipset though, and possibly write your own player around it, as using gst-launch is quite hard-core. There are several other open-source libraries to add nice features, e.g. lirc for IR remote controls, DirectFB for GUI/OSD and WebKit for web browsing. Qt may be ported as well, which would be a good plus to me. You may also consider live555, which is what VLC is using I think. Of course XBMC is still a great solution, if you want things working (almost) out of the box.

The best thing would be to double-check the SDK documentation (whenever accessible) and see what's supported by each particular chipset. Whenever a core feature is there (e.g. the codecs you want, input support, etc.) then it's possible to write some SW to use it. Unfortunately, in my experience, Python is seldom considered, but if you fancy C/C++, sky's the limit.

Run your own crawler, web/mail server on a plug computer

Nice to see this given the priority it needs. Now, hook up one of these, and you're on your way

Guess what? The GuruPlug Server Plus does have dual gigabit Ethernet and eSATA. Unfortunately, it's notorious for overheating.

Yeah, their developer conference starts tomorrow. Go figure.

in their spec sheet they go back and forth from B and b - if their documentation is at this level, well my advice is stay away

Stay away from Guruplug. They're sold with two gigabit NICs, but if you use them both at gig speeds, the Guruplugs overheat. Heck, mine exhibits the same syptoms (gets very hot and reboots) using one NIC at gig speeds while also maxing out the eSATA connection.

Originally, Globalscale had this to say:
http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=1735.msg12392#msg12392

Now, they say that the plugs aren't designed for this kind of use, and that they will sell "Professional Upgrade Kits" to let you use the devices in this way. Worse, to me, they're essentially rewriting history here. The forum post accurately quotes the original announcement dated 7/17/2010. The page now only shows an announcement 7/5/2010 mentioning what they are "designed" for and about the sale of the upgrade kits.

Frankly, I'm shocked that the units were sold with 2x1Gb NICs, but weren't tested using them and that they're considered "not designed to be used together." It's asinine that they would pull this crap.

No, it does not. Check out the spec sheet. http://www.plugcomputer.org/data/docs/ionics_plug_computer_info_sheet.pdf

They could also look into those Plug Computers. Low power Linux computer size of a power brick at around $99. They have upped the specs to 1.2GHz ARM recently.

http://www.plugcomputer.org/

(cheap & energy efficient Atom nettop would be fine too, of course...but WiFi routers are somewhat closer to the "independent" webcams you mentioned)

Not for the mass market or 'end user' at all, but for those interested in the DIY approach:
http://www.plugcomputer.org/

These little things are awesome.
2.5" usb powered external HD + a sheevaplug = teeny fileserver that can tuck away almost anywhere.

This plus two usb cameras could make a great webserver stream of the video.
Just plug it in the wall, give it ethernet or a wifi usb stick, and hang a camera off it.

Protip: In debian (and I assume any debian-like distro) you are just an apt-get install webcam-server away

They're just going to buy thousands of SheevaPlugs!

Not quite as beefy as a mac mini, but for my own home automation I've found these to be excellent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug
http://www.plugcomputer.org/

I built a small box with a USB hub IC and a number of parallel port USB chips for IO, which hangs off the plug computer. The thing fits in ceiling tiles and walls, really anywhere you have power and ethernet.

Unless of course you are going for the video output instead of usb, in which case the mac wins hands down.

The basic one is still made:
http://www.newit.co.uk/shop/products.php?cat=5 Cheap, USB+Ethernet

Updated version are coming RealSoonNow, including one with HDMI
http://www.newit.co.uk/shop/products.php?cat=11 there's a version with eSATA
http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-33-guruplug-display.aspx

And Marvell announced a v.3 at CES last Jan, no real product announced yet.

All of those support Debian, Ubuntu is on the way out since the new Ubuntu requires some instruction set extension that are not available on the old plugs.

There's a very active community at http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php

My SheevaPlug has a mini-USB connector on it. It's near impossible to brick. I even did a dd /dev/zero to the entire flash memory and was still able to get to the JTAG interface with a USB cable to my MacBookPro.

"Serial" shouldn't go away, but the massive plug should.

Apart from it being an N router (not sure what Linksys has in the way of N offerings, I'm still using a trusty WRT54G), this thing also has a USB port that you can hook up a USB drive to and use it like a NAS, which is kind of cool.

The Linksys NSLU2 is $80, which is a lot cheaper than $130 for the WNR3500L. I have an NSLU2, running linux, as a music server, and it works great. Considering what crap hardware most home routers are, I'd hesitate to trust one as a file server. The Marvell $99 wall-wart computer also looks kind of interesting.

What would really be handy would be an $80 NAS box that ran, say, debian, with a complete set of useful apps, was easy to set up, and was officially supported. The NSLU2 comes pretty close to this, because Linksys explicitly says it's ok with them if you install linux on it -- but they don't actually support that, and it's really kind of a hassle to set up. It's also a hassle to get the apps you want. E.g., I would really like to be able to run a more recent version of the Unison file synchronizer on my NSLU2, but when I try to compile and run it, it crashes, so I'm stuck with a precompiled binary of an older version.

Hi,

I'm in the process of moving my main Internet-facing server onto an ARM-based SheevaPlug (1.2GHz, 512MB memory) that consumes 3W--5W (pegged at 5W right now doing a large Java build/obfuscation).

http://plugcomputer.org/

http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-SheevaPlug-setup.html

Rgds

Damon

I have a single fileserver (soon to be replaced with a plug computer whenever mine ships).
Everything pulls from there.
Every once in a while I plug in my 1TB external USB driver and sync from the main server, then unplug and put back in the safe.

When I retire my fileserver and move to the plug computer, I will use my 1TB external for the server and buy another one for backups. It will be formatted with a different filesystem.

I imagine it wouldn't take too much tinkering to lop off the AC power supply
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2356496718.html gives us a picture, it seems the PSU is a seperate part (under a metal cover) connected via a 4 pin connector.

The schematic ( http://www.plugcomputer.org/data/docs/sch/Sheeva-final%20Schematic.pdf page 5 ) tells us the connectors pinout, that it is a 5V, 3A supply, and that it's designator is J3.

Unfortunatley the bill of materials ( http://www.plugcomputer.org/data/docs/sch/SHEEVA_V6.0_BOM.xls ) does not give us a part number but i'm pretty sure it's a type i've seen before and I could probablly find it in a parts catalog if I had the connector in front of me and the inclination to find it. Alternatively you could just cut the wires.

and wire it to run off 12V DC.
BTW if using electronics in a vehicle make sure you use a power supply designed for vehicle use. While vehicle power is nominally 12V it has a wide voltage range and is often very dirty.

I imagine it wouldn't take too much tinkering to lop off the AC power supply
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2356496718.html gives us a picture, it seems the PSU is a seperate part (under a metal cover) connected via a 4 pin connector.

The schematic ( http://www.plugcomputer.org/data/docs/sch/Sheeva-final%20Schematic.pdf page 5 ) tells us the connectors pinout, that it is a 5V, 3A supply, and that it's designator is J3.

Unfortunatley the bill of materials ( http://www.plugcomputer.org/data/docs/sch/SHEEVA_V6.0_BOM.xls ) does not give us a part number but i'm pretty sure it's a type i've seen before and I could probablly find it in a parts catalog if I had the connector in front of me and the inclination to find it. Alternatively you could just cut the wires.

and wire it to run off 12V DC.
BTW if using electronics in a vehicle make sure you use a power supply designed for vehicle use. While vehicle power is nominally 12V it has a wide voltage range and is often very dirty.