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Linux Wall Warts Small On Size, Big On Possibilities
davidmwilliams writes "Every geek and technology lover will undoubtedly have stumbled across online adverts for tiny headless Linux-powered devices that are barely larger than the power point they plug into. What can you actually do with them? Plenty, it seems!"
Firewalls, Torrent Slaves, Front end for a "remote desktop" style connection, small traveling computer for a hotel that has a flat screen, etc.
Living With a Nerd
Hidden Cameras.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Did it really need 3 pages? Nope.
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
Not a particularly attractive name overall, but I decided to search the web to see if it's in common usage. Turns out that it's only used in reference to AC adapters, not as all-in-one computers. In fact, the first reference to the term as it relates to a mini computer is this very article. So it looks like they're making up their own lingo.
After reading the article I am rather surprised there is no wireless interface. They could have saved one more cable.
This is not the penguin you're looking for.
Isn't this like the billionth Slashvertizement for SheevaPlugs? They're neat and all, but I think at this point everyone here knows about those things. I'll probably get one if I can ever think of a use for it.
SheevaPlug, I don't know about the rest of you but that name brings visions to my mind that has nothing to do with computers.
Got Code?
Does anybody know of a similar device that includes Homeplug so you can do away with the ethernet connection as well?
wot no sig
First, I misread this as "linux walmart" and thought it was some sort of "app store" deal. Closer inspection reveals the truth is far more disturbing. They should probably pick a new name... or dress them up like 'Shrek' and market them towards kids or something.
I'll wait for Apple to release the iPlug.
Plug computers are widely overrated. For the same price you can get a cheap home oriented NAS box like http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11384 with 1TB of storage that can be reflashed http://lacie.nas-central.org/wiki/Main_Page to do whatever you want.
They're still working out the bugs and they take months to ship(bill your credit card right away though). They said 2-3 months to go for a hardware fix for the Guruplug+'s overheating problem when using GigE, other than "use them at 10/100".
Sheevaplugs have gotten better though, the capacitors don't pop anymore, but both of them benefit from removing the 5v power and putting it in it's own box. Which doesn't entirely defeat the point, but it is a little aggravating. Still, unless you like paying now for flaky hardware from a company that has zero customer support and enjoy resoldering your power supply, buy one of the more commercial ones.
PS, I rather like mine, I'm just lowering your expectations so you might like what you get, if you still buy from Globalscale.
From the article:
Linux does the job admirably, with even the most full-featured distro like Debian being able to slot into the flash memory provided you're economical with what you install (scrap Gnome and KDE for starters!). Or Damn Small Linux and other distros of its ilk will do the job just fine too.
They always forget Puppy, which is a heck of a lot easier to use than DSL. Puppy can fit in as little as 32 megabytes with a full desktop even a kid could use.
.....and 512Mb DDR2 RAM.
Woah. I feel like I stepped into the Nintendo and Sega wars. 512 megabits == 64 megabytes in normal human parlance. i.e Twice as much as I have in my old Windows98 laptop and equal to what was in my OS 9 mac.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Botnets bitchez.
Yours In Astrakhan,
Kilgore Trout
P.S.: Bush-Gingrich 2012 !
I'm in the design phase of opening a consulting business (non-IT related) to run out of my home. Marvell's plugs look very attractive to me as a right-sized server for my modest needs. Email, web, file storage (especially with a RAID NAS or via DropBox) -- the wall wart looks just right for that kind of workload. I've worked in IT with big, fancy servers, and I just don't need them.
The alternative is to lease something like a Linode. I like the way Linode does business, but five months of their low-power service would buy a SheevaPlug. All I'm missing then is a static IP and the always-up cloudiness that Linode provides. The choices are tempting.
I'll wait for Apple to release the iPlug.
I swear I saw one of those at a sex shop once.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
You got wall warts from using a SheevaPlug, you better get some cream for that right away...
Gah, I grossed myself out... pleh!
crazy dynamite monkey
With infinite programming capabilities for encryption of recordings, offsite backups, and other sexy things you can think of. Hook it up to a small sensor that triggers the recording whenever a door opens and it can get really interesting. Computer, webcam, sensor, all fitting in your jacket pocket to install at home when you go on vacation, in the hotel room when you leave for a day trip, at the office when you leave for the weekend etc.
I actually RTFA because I'm interested in these things... And found it a total waste of time. Let me summarize everything in it:
The small and cheap, low-power computer that you plug directly into the wall is actually a small and cheap, low-power computer. It has USB 2.0 (as can be clearly seen in all pictures of the device). You can install linux on it and do stuff that such a linux computer could obviously be used at: File storage, run FTP server, run apache, use it as SSH gateway... That's about the list of ideas mentioned in TFA.
Did anyone here actually find new information (okay, 3rd page has a bit of technical specs. Nothing unexpected, nothing that would have taken more than 2 minutes to google) or ideas in the article? If so, what were they? If I missed something essential, my bad... But this seems to contain zero information. Especially to someone who already has interest to such devices (obviously, if you've never heard of these "wall warts" ((Okay, I hadn't heard that name being used for these devices before)) before, everything there was new. Though I still believe that running ftp server or ssh gateway would have been about the first things you would have thought of yourself, too).
You're probably thinking of the OhMiBod. Really. OhMiBod. I swear you can't make this stuff up. (And thanks to Engadget for informing me of this particular device's existence, before you ask how I know about it).
"What can you actually do with them? Plenty, it seems!"
Not really. The article spent 3 pages to say that you could use it as a file server with an external hard drive or... a web server. That's it?
This reads more like a slashvertisement for a product with no real purpose. Yes, it's great that it's cheap and runs linux, but if you need an external hard drive to get any real use out of it, what's the point in making it so small? Just make it the size of a caddy.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
The article mentions internet router, file storage, and print server. Really? That's the best you can do?
A decent dd-wrt compatible router is pretty inexpensive, and will give you a few port switch and a decent set of wireless antennas. Most people aren't so constrained on space that they can't tuck one away somewhere. They often include the capability of handling USB hard drives as well for file or print sharing. Many printers these days have built in ethernet or wireless to handle their own print serving capability.
Devices of this size do have possibilities, but the article doesn't mention anything really interesting. Apple has had its airport express base station for a while, and while it's mostly an ordinary wireless N router, it does provide music sharing via airtunes which works well if you happen to use the Apple/iTunes ecosystem for music.
So what do you do with a tiny Linux box? mpd or a squeezebox client would provide music sharing (though you can get Logitech's own radio for $100-$150, and it comes complete with a screen and controls). It would either need a good quality sound chip on it (unlikely) or a decent USB sound card (added expense, though).
What would be really neat is if they had an HDMI port for a thin client. Maybe an install of Android and its browser to turn a smaller LCD monitor into a little internet browsing box in otherwise cramped spaces (e.g. kitchen). Or have something powered off 12V and use it as the basis for a car computer.
Even with the current offerings, I'm sure there are much more interesting ideas that people could come up with (probably involving more significant hacking) than a file or print server.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Plug computers are widely overrated. For the same price you can get a cheap home oriented NAS box like http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11384 with 1TB of storage that can be reflashed http://lacie.nas-central.org/wiki/Main_Page to do whatever you want.
If you don't need the storage as much as you need the always-on/low power processing, you can get a WRT54-based router that can be relfashed with Tomato or DD-WRT, then you can install optware. The Asus WL-500G has enough guts to run Asterisk while still doing its primary purpose. Or maybe a cvs, svn or other repository. All for maybe half the price of the Sheevaplug. And much more available. Of course, it doesn't have the wall wart form factor, for good or bad. And it's not quite as discreet, if that's a requirement.
I am not a crackpot.
I own a few of these devices. My first one has a eSATA port that I connected to a 5 bay sata port expander. That has been my network DHCP/DDNS/fileserver/printspooler/VPN endpoint/etc for a while now. The problem is that its hard to justify when compared with the recent firewall/wireless devices that have USB ports for exactly this reason. Sure I can get ~60MB/sec, absolutely outrunning anything attached via USB, but it cost about 3x as much to get there compared with just purchasing a $70 netgear and plugging in a dual drive USB raid array.
Plus, these things _REQUIRE_ hacking to get them to do a lot of stuff. I wasted days of my life trying to figure out why the JTAG interfaces didn't work as documented, or trying to boot kernels that didn't come with the devices. Or even consistently boot off USB instead of internal flash. This would be fine, except they are hardly open devices. Much of the time wasted turns out to be endless reverse engineering closed portions of the device. Marvell publishes a fair amount of the documentation for them, but I quickly found, time and time again, that the information I needed wasn't available.
So, In the end, for low level stuff things. The AVR butterfly an similar devices are far better hacking platforms, and on the higher end its hard to ignore the atom nettops or dozens of very nice single board computers that are far more powerful for not much more money.
I have a Sheevaplug, and the problem I've encountered is the lack of hardware FPU. The article even recommends using them as an SSH server, and from my experience, it makes a poor fit in that role. You can SSH into it decently fast, but the lack of a hardware math unit adds around 5-10 seconds of delay when sshing from it to another computer. Your renderfarm idea would fail miserably, since 3D rendering is all about math, especially with angles and other floating-point usages. Maaaybe I could see a Quake server. Depending on how much math the server has to do.
Plug in the USB cable that came with your phone and use it to charge up your phone.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I have had 4 SheevaPlugs. Two died on me, one was replaced and the other I had to buy a replacement PSU. They are touted as plugging into a wall socket, but if you do that they are pretty precarious, and if you plug them in via a power cable, then they don't stack nicely. I prefer the PC Engines Alix boards (http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm) - based on the AMD Georde with 255MB of memory they seem to be as fast as a SheevaPlug (I read somewhere that the Kirkwood processor only has a 16-bit data bus whereas the Geode has a 32-bit data bus). The Alix systems have a nice Aluminium case and run cool and sweetly - a German company nrg-systems.de, sells cases that will take a 2.5" hard disk, which draws an extra 2 Watts above the 8-10 Watts that the base system uses. I have 3 Alix systems: one as my firewall, one running my Asterisk PBX and the other running Exim, Dovecot, NFS, Samba, etc. The three systems together draw less than 30 Watts, replacing a pair of 150 Watt tower systems that ran 24x7 saving enough on my electricity bill to pay for themselves in just over a year.
I'm using these devices now for R&D work. We started with the Sheeva plug, now the Guru plug. The devices are okay. If you are looking for a COTS general purpose computer, the price, size and capability cannot be beaten. If you have more specific needs, particularly consumer needs where you can give up size as a constraint, there are many other cheaper alternatives.
That said, if you open up one of these devices, the thickness of the "wall wart" is half power supply, and a lot of the space is allocated to thermal design (heat sink, space for airflow). If you don't need their (crappy) power supply, replace it with a 5 V DC-DC converter and you can run it in your car or in your custom R&D device like we are. Very few low cost (small, low power) GigE devices exist now. These are just about the only ones. Downside is that there is NO support (oh, I'm sorry, "community support"... not okay for corporate use). You have to go it alone if you want to do something that nobody else has done.
Globalscale (makers of the Sheeva/Guru plugs) are supposed to be releasing a GuruPlug "Display" device which has an HDMI port. It sounds cool, but based on my experiences buying the "Server" version on spec, wait until it is not just vaporware. They said that the "Server" version would include some things that aren't actually pinned out (so if you want, say, an I2C interface, you have to be prepared to go digging around on the circuit board, then you might have to deal with building a custom kernel, then you might have to pray on your knees before the dark god of fab, etc.).
And forget about using this as a portable device. Power draw is low but it still sucks down the juice if you're using it do actually do anything. And the ARM5 core does not, as I recall, support floating point operations, so they're emulated (at reduced speed). And last but not least you're going to be cross-compiling everything, or hooking up a hard drive so you can install a precompiled gcc and making less-common things from source.
All in all, are these show-stoppers? No. I'm still using a few of these for various jobs, like one which is going to go get pelted around in the ocean, and they're great if you can withstand the negatives. I have $200 worth of batteries to run it and a custom kernel build (and a separate board for the I2C interface, thanks a lot you jerks at Globalscale)... took a while to get going but it mostly does the job.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
I would be really interested in a plug computer with decent audio output. All it would need is a minimal Linux OS with Pulseaudio installed and an open network sink configured. It would allow me to define it as an output in my central mpd server and toggle attached speakers on and off with a mpd client. I've already done this with desktops, but I would love to have speakers and a tiny computer in every major room, so I can just decide what room(s) I want to be playing music in at any given moment.
In conjunction with some powered USB hubs, some cheap A/D->USB devices ($50 per 8 channels), and some hacked-together AC current probes, a power monitoring system for every line into your breaker box.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
My N800 only draws 5W max at the plug. IIRC my "ancient" Jornada 720 does as well. I've been planning to repurpose my N800 as an always-on wireless server once I get a replacement handheld. You can get last-gen handhelds in a similar price range as these plug computers.
I don't consider any of those to be relevant comparisons. The benchmark for the basic level of functionality is analog cable. Remember the words "cable ready?" Remember when you could plug the cable into anything -- a TV, a Tivo Series 1, a PCI tuner card -- and it Just Worked? I sure do. I paid Comcast literally thousands of dollars for that over the course of many years. It was a proven business model, and it's the reason that Comcast didn't close their doors decades ago.
Apparently some bean counter looked at all that money reliably coming in, month after month, year after year, and decided, "We need to do something about this. Can we use the switch to digital as some sort of excuse to get paying customers to go away?"
Piracy, until they offer the basic level of functionality that we've come to expect. I didn't pirate before, and I won't pirate after. I can't believe you asked that, because it's such an easy question. You can even verify that's it's probably the best answer, by the usual tools of ethics.
"What if everyone pirated TV until the basic level of service we expect were offered?" Answer: a service that Just Works would appear. You'd plug your cable into the back of your TV or HDHomeRun or whatever, and there are the TV shows that you paid for, hassle-free.
"What if not enough people pirate TV until the basic level of service we expect is offered?" Answer: the TV companies will never get serious and professional. People will continue paying for something that would have made everyone laugh with derision just ten years ago.
It's pretty obvious that it's the best thing for everyone to do.
There are plenty of amateurs out there who are willing to go through the inconvenience of repairing content to make it Just-Works-Ready, but I think the situation is not quite ideal. If a professional organization were to offer that, and use a better distribution tech than bittorrent (imagine some kind of multicast technology which could be received by some sort of standardized "tuner") it would flourish. How much would I pay for
as well as other conveniences, feeding right into my MythTV? Shit, I'd pay $50/month for that. And I can prove it: I did it for many years (except with a Tivo1 instead of Myth), as did millions of other people. We all know this works. Comcast could crush their pirate competitors in a heartbeat if they just put their mind to it, and they wouldn't even have to underbid them. Until then, though, piracy is the only game in town. Nobody else offers it at any price.
I'm not saying it would be free of consequences to the TV delivery company. Whatever TV company is able to come out with Just-Works service first, is going to have the same problem that cable companies had in times past: income. The poor bastards are going to have to hire accountants to keep track of all the money, pay more taxes, etc. It won't be easy, but that's the price of having stockholders. I know some cable exec is muttering, "fucking stockholders, all they want is a growing base of paying customers. Why can't they leave us alone?" to which I respond: Nobody held a gun to your head and said you had to work at a for-profit business. If money repels you so much, you can always join the Peace Corps.
(I get live news from over-the-air local channels, but I guess that's not universal.) Bittorrent won't get you those things right now, and yet it is The Way to eventually get them. Anyone who wants live news and sports to come back, is going to have to take a long-term strategic view. Pirate today, working realtime TV tomorrow.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.