Low-Cost Board Runs Linux, Google Apps

An anonymous reader writes to mention that hardware hacking enthusiasts can now get their hands on the guts of the Everex TC2502 Linux PC for just $60 (USD). The compact x86-compatible "gOS Dev Board" offers a lightweight Linux-based OS designed for use with Google Apps. " Along with a Firefox browser supporting the Google toolbar, gOS includes local productivity applications, such as OpenOffice.org. However, its main goal is "coherently packaging Google Apps to give users the idea that they can use Google as their main environment," explained Paul Kim, of Everex. "

Comments

Re:Cheap Cluster?

[vrmlguy]

The cheapest way to play with a Beowulf cluster is to set one up a cluster of virtual machines, using Xen or VMware. I'm more familar with the VMware products, so I'll describe them. You don't want VMware Player, since it is optimized to provide good graphics for playing games and the like. Instead you want VMware Server, which only supports standard VGA but is optimized to run lots of VMs in the background. Both of these are free, btw. Once you have your hypervisor set up, install several identical single-core VMs. Try for twice as many VMs as you have real processor cores. You almost certainly want to do this on a 2-way or 4-way processor, to get plenty of multiprocessing. You don't want to set up multi-core VMs, because they tend to perform much worse than virtual single-cores. "Attach" everything to a virtual switch than isn't connected to the outside world. Now you can experiment with all sorts of Beowulf configurations. Only when you get something that you like (say, for ray tracing) should you consider translating it into real hardware.