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Pocket Linux Server Showdown
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has put together a review of two pocket Linux servers (the Gumstix Connex 200 and the Waysmall 200BT). The review covers all aspects, including programming for the devices and their respective communities: "As with any OSS-based project, the community is what makes the Waysmall powerful. It's the community that comes up with novel applications, and develops new uses for the existing hardware. The Waysmall community is coming together as evidenced by several very involved projects and a healthy online presence in the wiki and mailing lists. Additionally, the Gumstix developers seem to be taking active roles in the community, folding community recommendations into their products as well as offering leadership and advice. Somewhat more organized and comprehensive documentation would be welcome, but not if it comes at the expense of accuracy, which the current documentation seems to have in hand.""
While the Gumstix offering could be useful for a number of applications, although I would be more inclined to buy the "bits" I needed for a specfic project, the Blackdog looks totally useless.
From the article it seems that it basically piggybacks onto a desktop computer, and them allows you to connect to it (in the articles case via X11) and run some applications... Given that it needs a much more powerful computer to control it what is the difference between it and a USB memory stick with applications that can run on the host os... The programs may be running on the blackdog instead of the host, but so what.
Gumstix on the otherhand looks like a nice solution for a robotics project I have starting in January...