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Linux In A Box
Henrik pointed us to the Linux in a Box project, which is a bitchin' little project to create an inexpensive little Linux box: it boots a 2.0.36 kernel from a ramdisk, and it's pingable and Telenetable, as well as being usable as a Web server. Only for the brave of heart and willing to hack.
Well, if we can do a Bridge/Firewall with it, it will be really cool.
- The Sigless Wonder
If i could fit in in a Spam tin, then it could be the world's smallest open relay mail server :)
Please stop using these nasty words on Slashdot. Sites like this that are child-accessible should know to restrain their content in the face of pending laws. How many times does it need to be told to people that content that is offensive to children needs to be kept away from them?
it boots a 2.0.36 kernel
On top of that, you go and influence these poor suggestable little children with thoughts of running an outdated kernel that is simply a security hole! How do you even dare? Would you allow your children to use NT3.5? Would you allow them to use an outdated kernel? Think, Taco, what about the children?
it's pingable and Telenetable, as well as being usable as a Web server. Only for the brave of heart and willing to hack.
I think you meant willing to be hacked. Once again, what about the children? Would you let your child use telnet? Why suggest it to the children on Slashdot? You should know better than that. As a maintainer of a website like this, you have a responsibility to not influence suggestible little children with Nazi ideas such as running Telnet on a computer.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
That'll teach them to run a webserver from an embedded processor!
/. ing.
I guess its the sort of webserver i'd like to have on my toaster so I didn't have to get up to check how brown my toast was but i'd like to think my toaster would be exempt from
Prettier box too.
Here is a story on Yahoo's daily news about IBM prototyping a wristwatch running Linux. It uses some wireless technology to communicate with other computers (no, there's not a dinky little 101 key keyboard with keys so small that philosophers can argue about how many angels can dance on them). The article says they're not planning on commecializing it though...
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
This is a simple distro (free!) that gets you up and running on a low-end system w/o a hard drive.
Get your Floppy Firewall at http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw.
If it don't have what you want, you can always add more. But, if you add too much, you might have to add a hard drive.
Fight Spammers!
Doesn't look like google have all that much of the site cached.
:)
You can get a bit more info about the project on this page but unfortunately it's in danish.
It appears to use an Intel 386EX embedded CPU, a 4Mbyte Prom, 64Mbytes DRAM (in a standard simm), and a 10mbit ethernet interface.
I'm unable to get any idea of how big this thing actually is or how complex it's pcb is well from looking at diagrams i'd speculate it's about 6x4 inches...
If only i spoke danish
Oh wait -- does anyone remember this Linux server in a box? You also might be able to get Linux in a box at this site.
Be sure to check out:
There are simply not enough things that come in boxes. Just think how shameful it is for all that fruit to be sitting out there naked in the produce section at the grocery store...
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
I for one, being an SA and amateur programmer,
would like building block systems. It would be
great to be able to buy systems for $300 - $400
that could be chained together to experiment with
distributed computing. The small and quiet are
for my studio apartment. If I had resources like
this, I could play with clusters and agents or
CODA. Anyone remember the Ergo brick? This is
what we need. Even better, computing could come
transmeta "slices". How cheap would a webpad be
if it had no LCD? Need more power in your cluster?
Just plug another slice into your cluster cabinet.
How small would a webpad be without display? You
could have a VCR sized chassis with 8 machines in
it.
-Dave
Firewalls/Routers
Vanity Web Servers - Set up your family photos
Small Workgroup Servers
Intranet Servers (Internal Project Pages)
"Whiteboard" servers
CVS Servers
Basically anything that requires a cheap, small, server without a high load.
I just boughta cheap ($129 us dollars) box the other day from egghead.com... it's basically a 200mhz, 64MB RAM, diskless box with linux on a 16MB flash rom. It's a kick-ass little box, perfectly setup to be a webserver, etc... How much cheaper does the "Linux in a box" project need to get? Is $129 enough? If so, contact fujitsu, the MFG of this box.
--cr@ckwhore
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Can you run it on a box?
And see how fast it overclocks?
Can you run it on a toaster?
Or run it on a roller coaster?
Can you run it on your phone?
And call your kernel far from home?
Can you run it on your watch?
Or pour some hot grits on your crotch?
The procedure for making the EPROMS for the RTD PC-104 card is as follows:
- Fire up the card with +5 and 12 volts
- Create a freshly formatted floppy with the included Datalight DOS 5.0 on it. I know, it's sad but we had some DOS setup code for the card.
- Drop loadlin and the kernal You DID build a baby size kernal for this with initrd right? on the floppy
- Create a ramdisk on you development system to build the root image for your new card
- umount the ramdisk
- Set the ramdisk to zeros with:
- Make a filesystem
/dev/ram0 4096
- Mount the ramdisk and copy your root filesystem in:
/dev/ram0 /mnt
/projects/snmp/root_fs/* /mnt
- unmount it again and squish it down with:
/mnt
/projects/snmp/eprom/root_fs.gz
- Now, use sneaker net to move the floppy to the DOS machine running the RTD supplied EPROM image maker and tell it to make the entire floppy into an EPROM image
.BIN file(s)
- Burn the files into EPROM, plug 'em into the card, apply power and open a beer as you watch Linux boot on a 4 inch card
Have fun.dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram0 count=4096
mke2fs -vm0
mount -t ext2
cp -pxR
umount
dd if=/dev/ram0 bs=1k count=4096 | gzip -v9 >
Imagine being able to snap together a Beowulf cluster. Run out of disk space, just snap on another RAID brick. Best of all, with the mindstorm attachments, you can watch the system upgrade itself when it needs more resources.
Just don't let your system have a credit card number or you may find it taking over your apartment today, and the world tomorrow....
--
If you have any intention of selling really lots of those units, you need to change your bootup, loading and configuration procedure rather drastically to:
STEP 1: Connect unit to LAN through RJ45, apply power.
STEP 2: Unit discovers all local networking parameters by snooping, configures itself as a webserver on an unused address of the subnet (snoop to see its advertisement), and everything else is configured up through a browser.
STEP 3: There is no step 3, because *everything* should be programmable in step 2, including uploading kernels to onboard flash.
Yes, I know that the reason PC-104 cards tend to be as dumb and old-fashioned as they were 5 years ago is because in theory every extra facility adds a fractional cost to the product, but I can't help feel that the accountants aren't factoring in the cost of people's time, nor the likelihood of increased sales if the item is massively easy to use.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Furthermore, it is not at all unlikely that something of 80386 vintage will seriously suck both for the purposes of servicing the LAN as well as for servicing a modem. On my newer (long retired) 80486 box, the UART couldn't cope well with a 28K modem; getting hardware for that now is liable to be a chore. Similar will be true for Ethernet; being limited to 10Base2 wouldn't kill me, as I use it to hook up my laptop, but a slow ISA card may actually hurt throughput.
I don't think this combo would work out terribly well to service a DSL or Cable Modem connection...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I, Mikael Dich, the designer of the Linux In A Box microprocessor board, is pleased that the LIAB project has come up on www.slashdot.com! http://www.liab.dk has broken down due to the heavy load, so here is a little information:
The board uses i386EX at 25 MHz, 4 Mbyte of FLASH, up to 64 Mbyte of DRAM (72 pin), 10BASE-T, runs on 9-24V DC or AC, 8 watt, 150 grams, 4*6 inches.
I am cofounder of the company "LIAB Electronics I/S" which produces and sells assembled LIAB microprocessor boards. We deliver these boards complete with a CD-ROM, a Users Manual and a Hardware Reference. Price approx. $300. The CD-ROM contains all documentation, including sources for the bootloader, kernel patches, images for an inital ramdisc, schematics and plot files for the PCB. This documentation is free and everybody is free to manufacture their own LIABs. You may change the design and use it as you want. You may download pdf versions of the (draft) Users Manual and Hardware Reference on http://www.liab.dk
The LIAB board now runs both version 2.0.36 and 2.2.14 of the Linux kernel. At least ten different extension boards have been designed for the 64 pins I/O connector: a 12 bit A/D card, a relay/optoisolated I/O card, an MP3 player using the STA013 MP3 decoder chip, an IDE harddisk interface, an HPIB interface and a floppy interface. We are working on an simple USB host interface these days. The board is considere ideal for educational purposes.
Mikael Dich, midi@www.liab.dk
That's why I made a free firewall that runs off hard disk - sure, it can be done from floppy, but I consider them too failure prone...
-John
Yup - but if you're user #7423, why don't you have the bonus? Anyway, if you whore yourself up to 50 points, then your karma gets stuck.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition