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Little Linux Systems For Whatever Ails Ya
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Looking for small pre-built systems for custom Linux-based projects or products? Look no further. LinuxDevices.com has assembled a handy reference list of small systems that can serve as ready-made platforms for prototyping applications, or as the basis of application-specific Linux-based systems and devices. The style, performance, and costs of these systems vary greatly."
Desirable features of dual-ethernet modles:
- Small size.
- Self powered with small batteries or easily concealed ac adapter.
- Easy to conceal in a corporate network. (Above suspended ceiling tiles, or behind faceplate of ethernet jack, inside of service pole between multiple cubicles.)
- Priced within teenager's or intern's budget.
Ideally, such a device would have an optional downloadable specialized 31337 skr1pt k1ddi3 distribution...- tools specialized to "phone-home" in the wee hours with sniffed data
- remote controlled attacks, MITM, dns/arp spoofing/poisioning, etc.
- transparent bridge to help make it hard to detect/locate, because you have to insert device "inline" between an ethernet port and the desktop workstation serviced by that ethernet jack.
(Please don't reply with "I could get arrested". I'm way past old enough to know better than to ever do this.) I just find the potential amusing. And it will inevitably happen -- including the part about being within the budget reach of said users. Just for penetration testing -- honest. Don't try this at home. (only at work)I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
And I envoke the law of you are stupid for not knowing what Godwin's law is. It does not censor useful discussion where Nazi's are mentioned, like this one. It simply states that when political arguments get long in the tooth, they seem to bring up Nazi's for emotional effect.
Contrast that with this poster mentioning that charisma is often a well weilded weapon. Indeed Hitler studied for months on exagerated poses to increase effectiveness with large audiences, Balmer must have also.
Now as an intelligent (notice the contrast here from you) poster mentioned, he should have contrasted the motives. Where Balmer is motivating a workforce, Hitler was motivating a malicious army to commit heinous acts. That is a real and notable difference. Balmer might not be holy in his intentions but they are far from being like Hitler.
Never the less, it is an accurate and fair warning that sometimes popular masses get entranced with charisma and do stupid things. For more enlightnement on this topic, watch 'The Prisioner' series. Envoke a intelligent response with allegories from it or the Simpsons instead of calling for censorship. Or just ignore it.
So in dear memory of Godwin's law, to blankley envoke a usenet flame control guideline as a method of censorship are the very same steps down the very path that Hitler lead a nation down and did very stupid things. I chose not to follow them, therefore I do not follow your envoking of Godwin's law.
Damn. Now I'm really puzzled. A GeForce, even on a slower machine, should get over 45fps. Yet, with 3D disabled, the Voodoo3 on the PII ~466 here can do only ~20.
Maybe I'll pick up the same model card that you have just to figure it out. If it doesn't work for games, I'll eat the restocking fee and hunt for something else.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
References: google.com, search "bt869 bt871". groups.google.com comes up short.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
For the reasons already mentioned, 3DFX cards aren't what I'm personally looking for. They're still good, though, and available if unsupported. Query Pricewatch for "Video Cards Voodoo 3500" and quite a few show up for ~$70usd.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Damn. The bt869 doesn't support tv-out from a 1024x768 source like the bt871. At best, it'll scroll.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
go check out nvidia's cards, as new as you want. Find a card that has a RCA/svideo out (option on all models). Now go grab nvidia's drivers, and read the TWINVIEW readme. It has directions for getting the TV out and the VGA out both seen by X, and the ability to run each display independant of the other.
If that was real IDE it might be interesting. I'm basically looking for what will essentially be a very small system. But I do want dual ethernet (it has) and IDE (maybe not), all in a nice (this isn't) case with space for a regular IDE drive (doubtful) and well ventilationed (doesn't look like it).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Okay, I'm not that sure about this. But I think my Elsa Gladiac with the Geforce MX400 does 3D and TV at the same time. I am not sure because I don't really play 3D games, but at least a few 3D xmms plugins got significantly faster after I installed the card and recompiled them (without changing the cpu, which is a 333 MHz P2). And the card drivers at least claim to be "NVIDIA_GLX".
I really have only one thing to say:
3dfx Voodoo3 3500TV.
Support for 3D is pretty obvious, and open source. Support for the TV-out (and in) is HERE, and the sourceforge project page is HERE. The code is pretty hairy, but it works. Not only that, but the TV out works at the same time as the 3D. I've seen it myself on my box. Only one problem - good luck finding one of these cards, considering that poor 3dfx is defunkt.
Hey,
For video, there are no choices that are compatable with Linux and support both;
I. 3D (good, current-generation)
II. TV-out (RCA and/or S-video)
You could try a VGA to TV converter. The Guillemot VGA-to-TV
Converter Deluxe-2 is good, according to this article. And only $120.
It might be worth your taking a look. You should be able to get 3D through it, because it just deals with the VGA output.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
You're right. They don't. I'm actually typing this on a machine with a Voodoo3 2000 installed, and have liked it...but try and run Tribes 2 on it. Anyone who has tried knows why a Voodoo3 isn't going to work.
The touchy 'bought up, closed up' aspect of the company itself is another factor.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
If that fails, maybe you are running 2 different versions of gears? Try using locate & which to determine what you have, and manually try both to see if you can duplicate the hang. Ex;
locate gears
(list of files named 'gears' appears)
which gears
(the program named 'gears' that will be executed when you don't specify a path)
/usr/local/bin/gears
/usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/gears
(two possible locations for gears found from using locate)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Someone else pointed out the MiniBook PC, which is also sold as the Capucino G1
RedHat is an option, but I wonder how well everything works. And it's fairly expensive (about 1000USD), but you get lots of goodies in a very small package:
6.2 x 5.8 x 1.8" x 2 lbs
Dvd or cd drive
10/100 RJ45 Ethernet
irDA port
AV/SVideo/VGA(1280x1024x24bit) video out
Stereo out, microphone in, internal speaker
Up to 256M ram
MPeg2 decoder w/motion compensation
2 USB, 1 serial, 1 parallel, ps2/ mouse & keyb
V.90 modem (winmodem?)
PIII to 1GHz, Cel @ 700Mhz
10-30G HD
Amazing specs. Anyone have any linux experience with this thing?
Another possibility for the near future would be something built on Via's ITX form factor. Their reference board (Vt6009) looks perfect for these kinds of application, and real products should be on the cheap side. Built for fanless operation (except for the power supply), it consumes max 6w with the via C3 (cyrix's) processor, making it a option to leave on all of the time as an appliance. Linux support of course is iffy at this point, but it looks like a promising basis for a hackable multimedia hub.
Feature highlights: 1394, usb, dvd motion hw, trident blade 3d, audio i/o, video out, microphone in, socket 370, 1 pci, 1 comm slot, 2 ata 100, ps/2 mouse,keyboard. Size should be something like 10x3x8 inches.
Slap a video/radio tuner in the pci slot, and ethernet or wireless in the comm slot, tack on some powered speakers, and replace your tivo, mp3 jukebox, dvd player, and stereo. Not the mention the possiblities for home surveillance, video intercoms, video editing, and other fun stuff.
Been there. The TWINVIEW_README file has no mention of RCA, TV, or S-video. Like Yetti stories, there are comments about support Real Soon Now, and some who say specific GeForce cards could do it...but no eyewitness accounts.
Another downside is that different Geforce cards use different chipsets to program the TV-out. Here are a couple comments on this (grabbed from Usenet via. a groups.google.com search);
...or this...
I can't get it working. Twinview works fine, but because the windowmanager is not able to detect 2 screens, windows are generally opened across both screens. I'm tired of moving every window to its right place. So I want two sessions on two independent desktops (kde 2.1.1). Is it possible?
Unfortunately, no followups on either thread. An extensive search showed more of the same; lots of second-hand sightings, but no Yetti.
ATI cards -- also promising -- come up short as well. The TV-out hardware hasn't changed on these cards in years, yet nobody can figure out how to enable it...and ATI isn't helping. The Gatos project has most of ATI's special video features working but still no video out.
One ray of hope comes from the comments of Dalinian (previous message) who seems to have peppy XMMS visual plugins. That's promising. Yet, Dalinian doesn't play 3D games, so couldn't confirm -- yet! (hope!) -- that 3D is actually enabled or that the card is simply faster with the new drivers.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Triple ethernet that one. But then it fails on another requirement: standard IDE interface.
Basically I need:
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Too bad /. doesn't have a "funny but yet serious at the same time" rating. You'd get it. Indeed, such a device could well be used for that. And there are a couple SBCs out there that might meet the need.
And of course, if you happen to know someone on the inside within the right department of your favorite law enforcement agency, they might know where they get theirs.
For my own needs, I'm building something somewhat larger, intended to be a little more obvious. It will have a web cache proxy (probably squid) and a mail server or proxy. My intent is to make this function with NO direct data paths between the internet and the protected LAN whatsoever (not even originated from inside). This is clearly not a box for geeks to play with (at least not with this configuration), but it can be for geeks who are making a business to provide security consulting to small businesses that barely know enough to know they need someone to protect their network for them. And heaven knows we need to have more geeks controlling businesses than being controlled by businesses.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
My project requires a standard IDE hard drive. That then requires a fan. And I don't want to be the builder of it; I want to get these from a company that will build them. Also, the purchase will be incremental as opposed to bulk; i.e. instead of buying 100 all at once, I only need them to gradually flow in at the pace I deploy them, which will start slow and ramp up.
Right now the design is built on a microATX motherboard and a small microATX style mini-tower case. The design of the case is poor for cooling purposes, and larger than I want. A rackmount would be fine (1U preferred, 2U absolute max) as long as the depth does not go beyond 16 inches (that will require something smaller than microATX to fit the drive and power supply at the same time).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Along those lines, I found another limit; normally, the TV out supports 640x480 or 800x600. If the GeForce card has a Conexant CX25871 (aka "BT871") TV signal decoder, it can also output 1024x768 to the TV.
This means that if the default desktop is 1024x768, then switching to a TV display will show the same desktop. Since TV (PAL or NTSC) can't handle 1024x768, the signal they actually get will be modified; text won't be as clear, other artifacts of TV display will appear (fuzzy, lower color accuracy), but otherwise will display the full image witout scrolling.
I've fired off a few emails to different manufacturers, asking them what chip they use, but so far...no responses.
Q. Does the card have RCA & S-video outs?
Q. Do you have any idea what your card uses?^
^. Issuing the command...
...should return something like "NVIDIA(0): TV Encoder detected as BT871"
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Agreed. Yet, there are so many downsides to either box that it's hard to list them all. Off the top of my head, both are either costly (needs developer kit), unavailable (unreleased, released in Japan to a limited audience), can't run 3D commercial Linux games (Tribes), and for what you get are costly+underpowered+inflexible.
There are also dozens of VGA-to-NTSC converters, some of them listed here.
Not cheap (an old complaint mentioned in the original message). Why spend usd$100+ for a VGA-to-RCA converter, if the video card already has S-video out?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
gears -fps
...report at 640x480 and 800x600?
Bonus question: :) Does the card have the ability to scale larger screens down using the aa features of the GeForce? (Ex. Simultanious display of a 1024x768 desktop on both TV and monitor. Same image appears on both, but the TV is of course not nearly as crisp.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
No dual ethernet models?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I've an Elsa nVidia geForce2 <guaranteed to have screwed up the FunnyCaPs>, and am running a more-or-less factory RedHat 7.0 (i.e. with security enhancements, some of my own devious rolling), using the nVidia drivers.
You know, I wonder if you could fit those 5 1/4" systems into a regular (but tall) computer case. Imagine, your own Beowulf cluster, under your desk... Seriously, though, it would come in handy for corporate server/low-U rackmount applications. Have all the cables/connections made inside the generic PC case, fill up the rest of the space with some network-storage (SnapIT type drives) hard drives, and you've got a server room in a tenth of the space. Of course, the servers in question would have to be DNS/DHCP/X/whatever that don't use large quantities of disk space (unless the disks are mounted via NFS, but then you pretty much need Gigabit Ethernet).
This
This link was posted in the comments to the embeded linux article: http://www.soekris.com/
It's the 21st Century Do you know what your government is doing
This is one place that can make a buck with Linux. Embedded stuff is required and not having to pay a tax per unit sold is preferable to what has been the way.
So far it's been a bit painful, but an OS as a give away is going to be the way to go. Hardware and service all the way.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
It looks like a great place to start looking, for sure. Because of this, I'm definitely going to be looking at all of these models, and it made the choices easier (esp. having the reviews linked in).
My only wish, though, is to have an approximate PRICE listed so I can compare everything at once. And perhaps a chart of specs, comparing all the apples and oranges for me.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
It's nice to have a reference list, but unless I have some anecdotal evidence as well, I'm always reluctant to set out for uncharted territories and leave behind what's been tried and true.
Does anyone have any realworld experience with these systems? Often, what looks good on paper turns out to be a complete waste of time and money because of some small inconvenience or incompatibility left unspecified in the specs.
I'd love to hear what anyone has to say.
Read the rest of this comment...
I am not try ing to flame anyone here...well maybe I am. All of you people who make outrageous claims about linux bringing your computer down for a week or taking 5 hours to configure a modem are just strait dumb. I don't know that much about computers or linux and i had it fully functional cdrw, webcam, internet connection, flash and java in 2 hours . everything right out of a how-to or a search engine. You people must not try very hard in other aspects of your life either. your wives/girlfriends must not (censored) very often either. But whatever. S/F Cpl Laque
It's all Politics
...a Linux box dedicated for, say, nonlinear video editing? I know that there are NLVE apps for Linux out there, although I couldn't say how they shape up against Premiere (or Ulead MediaStudio Pro). Such things would include 1394 support and a 100GB hard drive, maybe even a flat-panel display...
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Personally, I think the trouble to get the hardware working initially under Linux beats the heck out of the lifetime of fustration that Windows drivers tend to give me.
Does anyone know any kind of premade linux box that could possible be used an mp3 player? Yes, I know it would probably be easier to just buy one, but i want to be able to put in vorbis support and other such stuff. So what I would probably be looking for is something with:
:)
:)
:)
Hard drive or flash or something i could store the files on
Sound (no mp3 decoding chip, I plan on doing that in software)
Some sort of display mechanism and at least 2-3 buttons
A relatively small size (maybe about 4"x6"x.5")
A reasonably fast processor (I'm not sure what is needed, but probably about 200mhz)
And of course, the ability to run Linux
A nice looking case is NOT a requirement
If anyone has any ideas please post here or email me.
Thanks a lot
p.s. My email address in the profile is messed up... its "-ends-with-oo" not "-ends-w"
This is a very good start. As with every great company, you start little and work your way up. Marketing and word of mouth are what will bring people to your company. Be Os should pay head to this advice.
And what do you use it for?
Have you tried the Linux or *bsd or even beos compaitable products?
Were you trained with windows and so you didnt go on to anything else? How about Macintosh? How do you know linux is unstable? Did you configure it right? There are a million more ways to think about this, but its a biased ideal that makes it so that windows will have a large user base. I think linux is better than windows for the home market. My grandma doesnt want a blue screen, but she can install debian from start to finish with a clear concious because she knows that she is helping.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
has anyone tried to purchase one of these units? I would like to build a nice little firewall box or something... so where can I get one of these little gems? Of the ones that DO have any sort of place you can buy them they are waaay overpriced. I mean the darn PPC bRIQ (or whatever it is called) is $2,500!! I can get an iBook for almost half that complete with CD, monitor and keyboard.
It is all very well that these devices seem to be available but if they aren't easy to get or are priced prohibitively... what is the point?
"Don't sweat the technique."
At work, we've been searching for a product that we can use as an IPSEC-enabled router.
So far, we've just been giving out PC's with FreeS/WAN. But this gets a little bit expensive, so we've been trying to find an embedded solution. Any such product would have to meet the following requirements:
* Cheap
* Small
* Reasonably powerful (At least 200MHz for x86 processors)
* And hopefully, sleek looking.
LinuxDevices Mentions a product called the STBMX1030, which meets all of these requirements, and much much more. But it seems as though the company that makes them, Allwell, has stopped making them. Anyone know of anything else that fits the bill?
- James
There's a fine line between "enthusiastic" and "a fucking nutjob." Steve Ballmer knows about this fine line. He rolled it up and smoked it before this video was recorded.
----
Please, I are begging you! To save Dmitry from teh jail!
While I'm still learning about design, I sometimes question the effectiveness of trying to put linux onto anything you can get your hands on.
Wouldn't it be more effective to for some of these smaller devices to move more of their functionality to a hardware level? This is not a rhetorical question. I actually would like to know...
II. TV-out (RCA and/or S-video)
That's why you see tech sites talking about how to make your own TIVO-style device, or how to make a traveling MP3 jukebox, but none that mention 3D games. Only Nokia's planned Media Terminal is supposed to have both, and adding a VGA-to-RCA converter isn't cheap.
Think that Nvidia, ATI, or Matrox have this fixed? Nope.
At first glance, most of the /. minions out there will probably say "big deal". Well, smarty pants, I dare you. I dare all of you all. Find such a card. After much searching, it turns out that you can have either 3D or TV-out, but not both.
Any GeForce, Radeon, or G400 can pump out great 3D. Some -- but not all -- can be tweaked to output video to a standard TV using the Linux frame buffer...but in the process, you loose all 3D hardware acceleration.
Yow. Scratch 3D.
Enable 3D, and the TV-out ports aren't supported.
As for projects that are actively attempting to address the TV-out problem, they do exist. Sourceforge hosts a few, and Freshmeat has pointers to a few more. None have it licked, though. Most TV-out ports have some propriatory muck that makes supporting them difficult at best. If we're lucky, one of these companies will release a Macrovision-encrusted, binary-only, x86, version sometime in the next couple years.
How depressing...what was the story about the Zerox printer driver? How is it that 20+ years later, something so trivial is still a sticking point.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Does everything you require, plus a whole bunch more, and it's portable.
Plus it has a sexy case :)
It's perhaps not the cheapest option, but then, you do get a free, very powerful PDA thrown in with your MP3/Vorbis player...
I am looking for a very tiny linux based system with wireless internet so that I can hook it to that new camera in a pill and do live video confrencing from the inside of my large intestine. Let people know what I REALLY think of their ideas.
The best part would be the puns that would naturally form from this system, I leave you to figure them out yourself...
"Better hurry up with your briefing, I had taco bell for lunch and the bottom of the toilet bowl gets poor recpetion..."
Papa Legba come and open the gate
Although, the G3/G4 in a 5 1/4" drive might slot into a dashboard nicely for other uses. :)
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
It's a Celeron/P3 based computer about the size of a largish portable CD player. $445 in barebones form with CD drive (add your own memory, HD, and CPU), $100 more with a DVD drive. To see pictures, click the "See it" link. There are about 5 exterior and interior pics that you reach through the "next image" buttons.
The same kind of logic applies to many embedded Linux applications. Rather than spend resources designing custom hardware and custom software, it makes sense to use an off-the-shelf and well-understood hardware platform, along with an OS which comes with source, which allows it to be customized and stripped down as small as you need it, to the point where it can fit on a floppy or even a watch.
Instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel, smart designers will choose and customize components that already do most of what they want, which frees up resources to focus on the specific functionality they need, rather than on features that don't have much to do with the application, like memory management and task scheduling.
On some technical level, it might be appealing to have a machine that's been designed from the ground up to do one function, and only one function, with nothing extraneous. But in practice, this tends to be expensive, and the end result is often less flexible.
I think Runix, the Linux for the Sony Playstation 2, was released recently. The X Box should be out before Christmas, and I'd think Linux will be ported to that soon as well.
There are also dozens of VGA-to-NTSC converters, some of them listed here.
It doesn't look like TV-out is getting full use of the 3D hardware. For reference, the Voodoo3 2000 I'm using right now (no TV-out) can do ~40 fps in hardware with a PII 466. The Voodoo3 is a 16-bit color depth card with AGP 1x support. The Geforce you have is probably on a much faster machine and uses AGP 2x or 4x.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Thanks for the tip. Unfortunatly, I'm going to have to get something now. In 6 months, I'll take a look around again and if need be buy more hardware. So far, ATI Radeon DDR 32mb is the most likely card I'll get. With ATI, there's only 1 type of TV-out hardware, and the drivers are mostly open source, so the chance of getting something that will be abandoned later is lower.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.