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Tiny Boxen
swg101 writes "These people (openbrick.org) have developed a small computer designed for open source and free software. I quote: "This great little Linux box can be used as a firewall, micro-server, PABX, thin client, multimedia, almost anything imaginable. It contains a fanless 300 Mhz x86 compatible Geode processor and 128 MB SDRAM. Software can be installed on a Compact Flash or on an optional Hard Disk." Sounds like a nice solution for many applications."
Get the Google cache here: http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:fi5nQ4GvkE0C: openbrick.org/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Orange
(My moment of glory as a Karma Whore...)
Not officially, but it means 'the box' in swedish.
openbrick.org seems to be getting hit pretty hard, but Linux Max has a pretty detailed article on the Open Brick.. And it's not slashdotted.. yet... http://www.linuxmax.net/news/00816.html
If you look at this page, you'll see that for some of the features you need a non-free XFree 3.3.6 driver. Another fun detail on that page : description says : 300 to 400 EUR while it is sold for 590 EUR. But it definately is cool. Once they sell it for less than that 590 (which would buy you a nice PC WITH storage), and that non-free Xfree 3.3.6 driver thing is solved... it is a really nice box.
Welcome to Slashdot, where it gets to be 'Usenet in September' all year round. Boxen is a fairly standard bit of slang, but excuse me while I take my hissy fit outside now.
300 to 400 euros is WAY too much money for what you get, when you compare with things like the Via Epia motherboard (available for $130 at outpost. The Via Epia has an 800 Mhz x86 processor, SDRAM slots, is 18 cm on a side, and has practically everything you need but memory, storage and an ATX power supply. They even have a completely fanless 500 MHz version (althouh you can't get that version from Fry's).
Test your net with Netalyzr
One thing about all the compact flash stuff. Typical flashable memory can only be "erased" on the order of 100,000 times. Now, many of you are saying "sure, this isn't a problem" -- but i dont think most /.'ers realize how many temp files Linux (and Operating Systems in general) create. Unfortunately, using Fat32 or NTFS(if you were "Gasp" running nt/2k), you would be repeatledy using the same flash sectors, quickly burning them out.
This means the only really useful filesystem is LFS (see the SPRITE project -- http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/sprite/sprite
So no, you can't have a box that has no hard drive, as of yet, unless you have very specialized uses for which lfs work well. (sequential writes/reads, etc)
Wee! Final exam questions with applications in the real world!
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
specs and pics
How about one of these Via Eden 533MHz chips in a mini-ITX case like this one. For about $200 seems to be a lot cheaper than a lower end 300MHz processor. I can't see the other box since the site is slashdotted but the 2677R case seems small enough to me to be used as a set top box complete with an external power supply brick like a Mac G4 Cube. You could easily build one of these with no moving parts since the Eden needs no fan.
Lex Systems
Its tiny, powerfull, and has tripple ethernet... what more could you ask for?
well maybe a fanless cpu.
-Nick
now if i can only find somewhere that sells it....
It awfully looks like a re-branded Nagasaki MS2100, which wasn't designed specifically for Linux or Open Source, but works fine with it. MS2100 is a nice unit and we use it here extensively for thin clients/small routers, however not everybody would find it cheap - the price is >300$ US. It is not that high though, if you consider that it has PCMCIA/CF/DOM/DOM slots built-in.
Except that RAM only works when the machine is turned on. You need something more reliable for long-term storage.
Take a look here: Nagasaki Thin Client, there are versions with three NICs. OpenBrick actually looks to be a rebranded MS2100.
486/133, 3 NICs, 4.85" x 5.7" mobos, 64 mb RAM, plus dedicated encryption boards for $332
There's also http://www.bcmcom.com/tech/BOX-3410/BOX-3410.htm
Geode 300mhz, 2 NICs in 106mm (W) x 178mm (L) x 65mm (H)
and http://www.nexcom.com/product/ebc/ebs1563p/
VIA C3 processor, 3 NICs, 177 (W) x 51 (H) x 228.6 (D) mm
Depending on what you need, you could buy an old laptop off of ebay and get 2 nics for it.
-f
www.blackant.net
this is correct.
boxen = to box
wir boxen dem bush aufs maul = we punch bush in the face
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=boxen
Third entry down
The special logic involves checking to see if the flash bit contains the value (1/0) you want before writing to it.
Not exactly. Flash memory is written to by first erasing the sector to all 1's and then clearing the bits you want cleared.
With a 50% hit-rate 100k writes becomes 200k.
200,000 writes is still too few for a directory track.
data of a particular type (eg html or mpeg) tend to bias towards 1s or 0s.
HTML might bias slightly, but MPEG doesn't. If it did, you would be able to compress MPEG files further with the Huffman coding used in gzip. (You can't.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
I believe the Pope keeps his records in Latin, and that occasionally he commisions the creation of a new word in Latin when they can't get by otherwise. The Latin word for "helicopter" is such a word. So even Latin is not a safe refuge from change.
I did a lot of looking myself in the hopes of building a silent computer.
Caseoutlet.com seems to be by far the best.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
That web site looks much better than the one I found with a little googling.
The original design seems to come from Lucky Star in taiwan, but they went out of business earlier this year. Their PDFs show a lot more details of the boards and connectors.
Nagasaki looks like they have picked up the product line and are continuing with it. It would sure be nice to get a few of these for cheaper than the 470 Euros the OpenBrick guys are reselling them for. I can't google up any other distis here in Europe this late at night. Maybe I'll try again during the working week.
I've learned the chinese/taiwanese shops in the big cities are quite willing to get in exotic parts like these boxen. Every one of them seems to have an uncle or a brother as a contact in taiwan who knows someone, etc. It just takes a little social engineering to get them to dig for you, on the hope you'll buy lots of those components.
I've got a project coming up to make small, cheap, customisable firewalls supporting DSL or cable clients, no fans or noise or hard disks. Has to be half the price of a cisco pix 501, which are on ebay for around 500 euros. This MS2100/OpenBrick box would almost do it, except I don't want to be powering a sound card, parallel port, NTSC video, or all that other useless cruft.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Dude,
Boxen _is_a word:
boxen
a. Made of boxwood; pertaining to, or resembling, the box
The faded hue of sapless boxen leaves. --Dryden.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
It just happens to be developing a new meaning, by virtue of common usage:
boxen
(By analogy with VAXen) A fanciful plural of box often encountered in the phrase "Unix boxen", used to describe commodity Unix hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix boxen are interchangeable.
Clearing to 1s then blanking 0s would be more writes than just basic overwriting.
Flash memory is divided into sectors. When you erase a sector of flash memory, the whole sector becomes all 1's. The 100K writes figure refers to 100K successful erases of a given sector. "Just basic overwriting" would AND the written data into the existing data. I'm guessing that flash file systems take advantage of this somehow.
And Huffman encoding is about repeating patterns, not frequency of 1s and 0s without order taken into account. You take a long but frequent pattern and replace it with a shorter one, but then have to remap the shorter one etc.
Huffman maps fixed-length sequences of bits (usually 4, 8, or 16 at a time) to variable-length sequences of bits. If you have lots more 1's than 0's, then you'll get a lot of 1111, 1110, 1101, 1011, and 0111 nibbles, which can be reduced to shorter words. However, JPEG, MP3, and MPEG already have compression (including Huffman coding) in the bitstream, so re-compressing the data isn't going to help.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This case + a mini-itx motherboard (available on same site), a slim CD-rom, a 2.5" HDD and an extra ethernet card in the available PCI slot. Tada! A VIA EPIA 5000 would make it fanless and very quiet (except for the harddrive then...). 11.50"(295mm) x 2.50"(63.5mm) x 10.75"(273mm).
And then there's the 42(H) x 220(W) x 165(D) mm LIGHT System that you can get with three ethernet ports. Though I donät know where to buy it yet..