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Embedded Linux Hardware Resources?
jessecurry asks: "I've recently come up with a conceptual Linux based piece of hardware and have been able to find a huge amount of information regarding getting Linux on to a device, but almost nothing about creating the device itself. I'd like to know if there are any books, online guides, or software that would help in designing a device that would accept some flavor of Linux. I really don't want to go 'off the shelf', but I need something that can at least display graphics, respond to positional input, and play sound. Also, is there a good place to have all of these components put together once I have a finalized design?"
On how many you want! The answer is very different even for 1 or 20, let alone two million.
The RTAI mailing lists are a good place for this kind of question however, and handhelds.org has a lot of links to embedded Linux projects.
Beep beep.
Some folks swear by 'em, some folks hate 'em. Check out http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/dbhardware2/ Covers a range of embedded devices from PICs to DSPs and talks about the various buses you'll see.
If you want to make something useful you should be concerned about what the device is supposed to do, how compact it is, how much it should cost etc. Whatever OS is selected (if any) it should logically follow from the goals of the project. Unless this is an academic or work experience building effort, the OS selected is just a detail. Otherwise, it's a bit like asking "how can I build an embedded systems that uses 2k resistors".
Look at the gumstix: http://www.gumstix.org
Their boards will do everything you've mentioned, they have good documentation, the schematics are under creative commons, and it runs Linux.