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$100 Linux Wall-Wart Now Available
nerdyH sends us to LinuxDevices for a description of a tiny Linux device called the Marvell SheevaPlug. "A $100 Linux wall wart could do to servers what netbooks did to notebooks. With the Marvell SheevaPlug, you get a completely open (hardware and software) Linux server resembling a typical wall-wart power adapter, but running Linux on a 1.2GHz CPU, with 512MB of RAM, and 512MB of Flash. I/O includes USB 2.0, gigabit Ethernet, while expansion is provided via an SDIO slot. The power draw is a nightlight-like 5 Watts. Marvell says it plans to give Linux developers everything they need to deliver 'disruptive' services on the device." The article links four products built on the SheevaPlug, none of them shipping quite yet. The development kit is available from Marvell.
I've run into this with a number of shopping carts, including some big name sites. I usually have to switch to a different browser - a lot of carts don't work with Safari or Chrome, and some don't even work with FireFox.
No sig? Sigh...
Are you kidding? Not enough CPU power? 1.2 GHz is enough for me to do raytracing!
Anyway, if you are going to do video encoding and translate your camera's pics from raw, it is not as if you need to sit and watch it. Just let the device run and do the work. 5 Watts isn't that much.
Kids these days.
I'm glad it doesn't have built in wifi. I'll simply attach an Atheros USB dongle with SMA connector and high gain antenna. Instant very high powered access point/storage system.
Charles Wyble System Engineer
Then sucks again once you realize NFS over GbE easily hits 70MB/s while USB2 gets maybe 30MB/s on a good day.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/02/100_linux_wallwart_launches.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890
http://dailydiy.com/2009/02/24/100-linux-wall-wart-launches/
you can sniff/analyze/record all unencrypted traffic until you run out of RAM.
And if you can get away with opening an encrypted network connection to some drop box, you don't have to worry about RAM.
Just be sure to remove it the next day before anyone notices.
I suspect that in most places it could be there for months -- maybe years -- before anyone noticed. Make sure the drop isn't traceable to you and just collect the take as long as it goes unnoticed.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Here is good response to this meme: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/ The most interesting analysis is after "Update 2". Also click on Graham's thesis summary.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
http://www.networkmirror.com/MuDp_g5XY_ZJoCQZ/linuxdevices.com/news/NS9634061300.html
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
By the look of it, this is more of a polished dev kit than a shelf-ready product. Marvell, typically, sells silicon, not widgets, so that would be standard for them. Also, TFA mentions schematics being available under some sort of free licence, and a bunch of companies already building devices based on this thing.
I suspect that products derived from this model will tend to have more in the way of peripherals; but as a dev kit that requires no special handling or equipment, and is priced within the range of virtually any student, linux hacker, or general tinkerer, this looks like a fun bit of kit. I know I'm tempted.
The design is open - re-engineer the board.
Beagleboard is another. Same chip as the latest generation of Gumstix, circuit board double the size but with many more on-board connectors, for the same price as the Gumstix.
I recently just dumped my linux server from my house. not from lack of love, but from lack of space. i replaced it with the DNS-323 from Linksys. it's a NAS box (2 drives) that is easily hacked to run linux. the tiny box now serves as my web server, ftp server, upnp video/music server, torrents, the whole enchilada. all in a box the size of 2 hard drives. i have the whole thing tucked in a back cupboard. much easier and quieter than a full system.
LinuxDevices constantly showcases new and fascinating Linux-based hardware like this. Everything from phones to tablets to embedded systems. The problem is that few of these ever seem to make it to market and the ones that do are usually only available to companies who can buy them by the thousands. The remainder that are within the reach of the average hobbyist don't stack up price-wise to more pedestrian solutions that can do the job for cheaper (e.g., a netbook, WRT54GL, or NSLU2).
"I'm just not quite sure what I could use it for. It's too underpowered for video encoding/decoding,"
It could probably do a bit of that, transcoding and serving anyway.
This sounds like an absolutely perfect replacement for my Linksys NSLU2. It's only 266MHz and has 32MB of RAM. At the moment I have one doing mail/web server duty and one running torrentflux-b4rt and mediatomb, streaming music and video to my PS3 and to my machine at work.
That second one is straining to keep up, this little box sounds like it fits the bill perfectly. Similarly powered NAS boxes cost multiple hundreds.
It's interesting to compare this to the Linksys NSLU2, which I'm using as a home music server.
So I guess with the Marvell box you get somewhat higher specs, but I'm not sure you really need the higher specs. For most applications, you're going to attach a keychain usb drive to these things, and then the internal flash becomes irrelevant. 32 MB of memory may not sound like much these days, but it's actually plenty for a file server, music server, home automation system, etc. The main advantage I could see to the Marvell is that it sounds a little more open. Linksys ships the NSLU2 in a configuration where it's not really a general-purpose linux box, and you have to go through some hassles to get a real linux on it where you can install packages, etc. Linksys does, however, officially bless the use of third-party linix distros on the NSLU2.
Find free books.
It's not all that uncommon in smaller networks to whitelist MACs to an ethernet port or a subnet. It's an easy way to discourage the salesweasles from trying to access the network with an unauthorized notebook. Won't stop MAC spoofing, of course, and something like this little device could work inline with a PC, spoofing it's MAC address, and be accessible via a separate 802.11 link to a hostile network. But, you would need to do more than that to remain undetected on a reasonably secured, wired network.
Why not just use something that's already available, like a RouterStation or Microtik RB433? The RouterStation's cheaper than Marvell's wart, too.
Back in the day, ftp.cdrom.com served ~1TB a day from 1 box, a 200-MHz P6 Pentium Pro.
(yeah yeah, ftp.cdrom.com had industrial quality I/O, but 1.2GHz is a LOT of computer power for anything but graphics.)
Have you actually attempted to do raytracing on an ARM processor? For one thing, there is no hardware floating point on this processor, all floating point has to be done with software code taking 10s of instructions for things like adding two floating point numbers.
You are falling for the megahertz myth, but in the other direction. An Xscale core like the one this chip uses is basically a classic five-stage pipeline with very few frills (interestingly it does have very rudimentary branch prediction). There is no superscalar type features.
Multiplys can take up to a few clock cycles, for example, halting everything else.
WMMXT is also a very simplistic SIMD offering compared to the SSE* you might be used to.
Problem solved.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
YMMV.. I have a pair of Panasonic powerline network adapters. I get about 45 mbps sustained (indeed these adapters are also "up to 200 mbps"), but the latency is quite decent at less than 5 ms extra latency compared to an ordinary wire.
I'm very happy with this solution since my apartment is bombarded with competing WiFi networks from the neighbors as well as the super-crappy old microwaves my apartment complex uses that completely kill anything at 2.4 GHz.