Slashdot Mirror
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. "
"a lightweight...OS designed for use with [web apps]"
aka: Thin Client
Coming soon to a handset near you! Oh, wait...
What exactly is the BIG DEAL? I would still need to buy a disk drive ($50), some RAM ($30), a box/supply ($30), a monitor ($100), a keyboard and mouse ($20), and perhaps some speakers ($15) ... the motherboard and CPU are no longer the major expense in putting together a PC. Heck, newegg has the Celeron D315 (2.26GHz) for $38, and an MSI barebones system (box, 300W power supply, motherboard) for $70. Add in another $100 for HD/RAM/KB/Mouse an you have a pretty decent system for $208.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
From the article:
"..but with the lightweight Enlightenment window manager instead of heavy Gnome/KDE desktops. "
I never thought I would live to see the day.....
Website Hosting
This is just a motherboard, with a C7 processor already attached to it. No memory, no non-volatile storage...
According to TFA, it "comes with gOS", but gOS doesn't sit anywhere on this 'dev board', it has to be installed onto a regular hard drive just like a normal computer.
Bad article. It's not a dev board, it's an entirely normal mobo. The ONLY thing about it that is even remotely special is that there are linux drivers for all its components.
If it were a dev board I'd want at least some attached flash storage, and some interesting pin headers.
The form factor is to big to fit in the really small cases (mini-atx) and too small to expand in a big case. Besides, motherboard CPU combos at about this price with more performance are not uncommon. http://www.directron.com/nf61sm7comb58.html Nothing really special about this but the Google tag.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135057
$9 more, NVidia graphics processor, Athlon 3200+, same 0-MB of RAM...
You'll need a heat sink. Avoid installing >1 DIMM. Does that qualify as 'close'?
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
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.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?