Slashdot Mirror
Tiny $45 Cubic Mini-PC Supports Android and Linux
DeviceGuru writes "SolidRun refreshed its line of tiny 2 x 2 x 2-inch mini-PCs with four new community-backed models based on 1.2GHz multi-core Freescale i.MX6 SoCs. The CuBox-i devices support Android 4.2.2 and Linux, offer HDMI, S/PDIF, IR, eSATA, GbE, USB, WiFi, and Bluetooth interfaces (depending on model). All the models offer 1.2GHz clock speeds, OpenGL/ES 2.0 3D support, and video acceleration for 1080p video, while the two higher-end ones supply more robust GPUs that add OpenCL 1.1 support."
How much RAM?
I'll be more impressed when I can actually buy a sub $100 PC... Too many broken promises.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Will buy it, but will not preorder it. I have a bad experience with such a business strategy. And lets face it, preorder is like giving away a lot of money with the hope that the seller will fulfill his promise, to deliver....i hope you got the picture.
1) it's a small PC which is cool but there is something to be said for mechanical stability, which is why all those android sticks plug directly into an HDMI port. i'm not saying they should do that but they need to do something.
2) eSATA enclosures are costly (nearly the same price as the CuBox) so why not just have SATA port and offer larger cases that incorporate everything you need, like a power system so that you you can run this using your 2.5" or 3.5" drive? it would even solve the mechanical stability issue.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The only thing that's really news here is that the mini-PC comes with semi-official Linux support, basically a community forum that's linked off the home page. Otherwise there are dozens of other thumb to palm-size computers out there, starting from the most famous Raspberry Pi's to generic HDMI dongles. Except for the cheapest ones which run some chip-specific OS, all of the HDMI dongles run Android. Installing desktop Linux on them should, at worst, be a matter of rooting the device and bootstrapping a bare-bones ARM distro like Debian or Arch on top of the Android kernel.
True. However, does Richard Stallman now seem so stupid for asking that everyone call "Linux" systems "GNU/Linux" systems? We now have Android/Linux as well as GNU/Linux, so the distinction actually turns out to be a rather important one to make. Everyone likes to joke about how RMS is a crackpot with bad hygeine, but it seems he's been right more often than not.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I'm underwhelmed. The top end quad core device is $130, and they want another $38 for "shipping" (Stated as "$18 to $38). Clearly a 2x2x2 device, even well packed, should cost a lot less to ship. And on top of that, the Android microSd card is "optional". In that price range I can buy a damn nice quad core tablet with HDMI output. Might not have eSATA support, but will have USB support and will have a color touch screen, battery, accelerometers and position sensor (and maybe a Gyro or even GPS) and a lot more utility. Or if you want to go completely low end you can still get low end tablets for close to the base price of this device.
You would be much better off buying a Pi, or hacking a ChromeCast or ever a hackable Linux based router. This looks to me like another "me too" device to profit off the community funding model.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Sorry, we need your cred's back... You confused subject with content.
-no sig today-
Idiots! Gosh...
Far too much debate on the internet goes into arguing about what words really mean. It is true that Android could be argued that it is simply another distribution based on a Linux kernel, and I would agree...and then call that version of Linux Android, but confusingly Linux is really a reference to GNU/Linux or Desktop Linux, shortened intentionally because Linus is awesome, or more likely out of "common usage" which has come about because its kind of catchy, even if you deep down think that GNU/Linux was probably a more deserving title.
At this point, Android/Linux is usually just "Android", and GNU/Linux is just "Linux". The only times that I hear a different use in my life is when someone's trying to sound smart on the internet. So far, it seems like disambiguation has kind of taken care of itself.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The picture shows it supports OpenGL ES 2.0 but how much video RAM do the various models have?
http://files.linuxgizmos.com/freescale-imx6q.jpg
Anyone have any specs on the GPU such as texture fill rate, bandwidth, etc?
Aside, while the Arduino has a RTC (Real-Time Clock) the Raspberry Pi doesn't. At least this i.MX does.
No Arduino boards I'm aware of come with an RTC.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I want a car-puter that's worth a damn and I'm flexible about what I would find acceptable in that regard.
1. I want it in a car (obviously) but that means it requires some things other computing devices will not but among these are power/heat management and tolerance most might begin to realize is completely hostile to computer devices.
2. I want it to meet current expectations in software and in hardware. (For example, 1280x800 minimum display, not 800x480 and Android 4.x, not Android 2.x! I am looking at YOU Parrot! You insult us all with your specs.)
3. I want it to be flexible and more general purpose even if it is limited by its use in a car. This means having a wide range of peripheral inputs and outputs and the ability to use a variety of displays and display types. It also means keeping it open and not restricted. (Parrot, could you explain to me your parrot store or whatever you call it? I get that things *can* be side-loaded, but I think that was more of a concession than anything else.)
4. I want it to be open as Android was intended. This means we will buy your hardware, but don't try to tell us what we can do with it. We KNOW what's on your mind and we don't approve. It's not so much about "quality control" as much as it is consumer control. Parrot, once again, I'm looking at you. There are competitors coming hard and fast and you don't want to be forgotten simply because you thought being among the first means you can take advantage of the lacking consumer choice. Some consumers have a short memory while others like me do not. I will NEVER buy Sony again, for example. Sony doesn't respect consumers. I won't buy into that ever.
I can't believe there isn't a market for what I want.
Why do these newer small computers always seem to lack a serial port? Do you have to connect a physical keyboard and monitor to configure sshd before you can get in through the ethernet or wireless interfaces and run it headless? Or can you get console IO through the USB ports?
Related question: is GPU acceleration available without connecting a physical monitor? Some systems seem to require a dongle to fool the computer into thinking a monitor is attached before loading the drivers that provide access to the GPU.
Why didn't they break out the PCIe port on the imx6? I understand that cost is an issue but how much extra could a mini PCI port cost to add?
yes, only problem is that android on these systems is absolutely horrible for anything but media center work. If you want a PC, then don't go for any of those. I have a mk802 II and its capabilities as a general purpose machine are pathetic
This looks like it would make a great DVR frontend device IF it has usable video acceleration. The summary says that it does, but there is a huge difference between hardware capable of a feature and functioning Linux support for it.
What video formats does it support? Only H.264, like most recent devices? Or, will it do MPEG2 (the U.S. broadcast HDTV standard)?
Does it have Linux drivers for the video acceleration? VDPAU API support?
There are tons of devices out there that look great on paper, but very few that are usable in reality. If this turns out to work, I'll buy a few of them. But, I'll wait for that to be proven before jumping in.
This seems very promising, especially as a small media centre. I wonder however how it compares to cubieboard2 and other dual core arm processors based soc. Also, community support is important for that kind of device and it may take some time before documentation is good enough. But all cubox versions seems fair-priced. Even Intel new Haswell Nuc is very similar to those board, albeit with much faster specs and slightly bigger case, but same 1.3 ghz and more and more integration inside cpu chip. Desktops computers may very soon turn into a battle between small soc and nuc, who both support Gnu/ Linux and Android, as windows seems a bit irrelevant now for that kind of device and to most people who prefer to use a phone or tablet. This is interesting to look upon too as it may be the sign of a second golden age of computing.
What I'd really want is a small ARM-based board that's good for a low-power server; something that can run a simple web site, Tiny Tiny RSS and keep a few git repositories.
The boards we're seeing now are getting close; they have 1-2GB memory, networking and SATA interfaces. What's really missing is the software support over time. Unlike an embedded system you do want security updates and OS updates over time, so you really want a platform that is a regular target for a major distro, whether Red Hat, Ubuntu or someone else.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I like the idea, but at the high end with shipping you are almost up into the Celeron price range. This would be for a 14W motherboard/cpu combo which should outperform this and would be a much more flexible system.
Something like this might be just the thing I'm looking for -- There are other tiny android boxes I've been looking at to replace my (aging) htpc. I want to be able to use my nexus 7 as a remote -- to control *everything* on the TV -- that's local video, netflix & random web stuff. Also I'd like to have a single audio output to my sound system for everything, but not have to have the TV on to listen to music. I've yet to find anything truly ideal. Even this probably won't be perfect, but at least it would be inexpensive and tiny: my current htpc is in a large case. I've been thinking Raspberry PI, which would be almost perfect, except no netflix...
The proper way to say this is "Android is a Linux." It is neither definitive of what Linux is nor a representative member of what a Linix has come to be understood to be. But it is A Linux.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
low ram only 512 in base and max out at 2GB?
I know /. is a nerd site and all, and you might get a bite from one of the contributors to weigh in, but a guarantee is asking a bit much.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
its always the tag "shipping cost" which makes the final cost pretty damn high. You might be better off with Parallella board(go figure) or..with the weed my neighbour dude gets me..
All these ARM SOCs are nice but they all have weird closed up GPUs that have crap close sourced drivers that barely work.
There are projects to reverse engineer Adreno (Qualcomm) and Mali (ARM) GPUs and implement drivers for them, but these projects are nowhere near production ready. And as far as I know Qualcomm has other issues with openness- they are denying release of hackable Android for their devices because it contains some secret proprietary BLOBs, without which it won't work.
So when it comes to Linux hardware support on ARM, it feels like 90s all over again... I'd rather buy a small x86, it will be larger, more expensive, it will consume much more power, but at least open-source hardware support is going to be nice and I won't need any BLOBs.
--Coder
You've abused an apostrophe. Prepare to die.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Once you start browsing the web site for these cubes, it's surprisingly shallow. There is no real information, the forum has a total of 6 posts and the wiki is empty. If you want to find out what video codecs are supported, or what linux distributions are ported to this device, your search will turn up nothing.
This may all change, but once you're getting your product up on sites like SlashDot, you really should have things like this taken care of. Right now it has a vaporware scent all over it and it may just be the next cheap dealextreme android HTPC device that comes with a load of half functioning applications and no way to get it fixed.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
After a ball or compact rounded shape, the cube is the worst shape for passive cooling efficiency.
Also the shape must have been chosen only for aesthetic and not with any pratical considerations: this is not what I call design.
It's a matter of an old-fashioned thing called 'common decency' to call it GNU/Linux. Without the thousands of GNU components the OS wouldn't even have a working compiler suite. Credit to where it's due.
As for Android, it's just Android although it should be Android/Linux. That's because the company that made Android is not very decent.
I'm sick of all these mini SoC that only have hardware decoding to do 1080p video but only JUST enough grunt/ram to run XBMC. Gimme something that can actually handle XBMC + Aeon or a skin other than Confluence at a decent clip, then I'll be impressed.
Oh I don't know. If general purpose is web browsing, email, Facebook, Netflix, and some casual gaming it's actually pretty good. It won't run Crysis, even through an RDP connection to my gaming PC, but I didn't expect that from a $40 HDMI stick.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
no the differentiation is not important at all. We have android and we have Linux. At least that is what most people in the real world call them, those that understand the difference don't need it pointed out and those that don't understand could not give a shit anyway.
So it's a Choose Two corollary: Cheap, Fast, Fully Open - choose two.
They don't have dedicated VRAM like a graphics card in a PC, they just allocate some portion of the main RAM as VRAM.
Mada mada dane.
Now we know where all those unsold OUYA units went.
Uhm, but Android truly is Linux. For many kinds of development work targetting Android, that fact is very important.
It matters very much that Android and, say, Ubuntu, have the same Linux kernel. It allows for an amazing span of shared effort. And of course it matters very much that Android and Ubuntu are very different OSes.
So, yes, RMS is exactly right.
I'll furthermore add that Debian, and OS that many people like you would like to simply call "Linux", is also available in a totally entirely absolutely non-Linux version called Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
Names are important and the situation has not taken care of itself.
I would be happy if it just ran Half-Life 3...
Yes & No. Here, Linux means a conventional distro like Ubuntu, whereas Android means the tablet/phone OS based on the Linux kernel w/ the Dalvik VM on top of it. Android implies that a whole ecosystem of apps is available, whereas w/ Linux, it varies.
The thing I'm wondering is - if it's not a tablet and needs to be connected to a non-touch external monitor, why use Android, instead of ChromeOS?
The moment anyone uses a different non-GNU userland w/ Linux, it would no longer be GNU/Linux, but it wouldn't be Android either. So it makes sense to just use Android for Android, Chrome OS for ChromeOS and Linux for conventional combinations of the Linux kernel and GNU/BSD/Other userlands.
This is an ARM, not x64 box, so Windows is a non starter. Unless someone manages to get Microsoft to port Windows RT to this platform
There's nothing "conventional" about desktop OSes. If anything, Linux is used much more in embedded and now mobile applications. It's desktop Linux OSes that are the outliers.
I have their older 700MHz unit (single core) 2 GB of memory I bought not too long ago (of course, that is how it always works). So far the unit has actually exceeded my expectations and is a lot of fun to play with. For me I wanted something that I could install Kali Linux on (the successor to Backtrack Linux) to do some simple type attacks on a network (I teach part time at a community college an information security class). First what I don't like: The shipping comes for Isreal. The price of shipping is $30 which raises the cost of the product. That they came out with a new one shortly after I already bought one that includes a lot of features I wanted. What I like: Gigabit ethernet They have this thing called u-boot which is pretty slick. You stick a file on a usb memory stick and stick it into the top USB port. Connect the ethernet and then boot up and it asks you what OS you want to install. You can select Ubuntu, Opensuse, Fedora, XBMC and a bunch more and it just installs them to the SD card. Very slick. It has the ability to serial into the unit so you don't have to set up a mouse, keyboard and monitor to install OSes. Works in Linux and Windows (with putty fine). I can then do SSH X forwarding really easy from the network if you want a GUI. I have been able to run a slew of python things on it and the performance is reasonable. I really have been having fun with it.
Uhm, but Android truly is Linux.
Right....I never said that it wasn't. my claim is that the ones that it matters to (developers) already know that as well. I'll give you that RMS is technically correct, but I don't think he's *practically* correct. The people to whom a given system's architecture matters will either know it already or be forced to figure it out. For everyone else....well, my sister doesn't care how her phone's userspace is architected, but she *does* care that it's "Android", since that actually impacts how she uses it.
I'll furthermore add that Debian, and OS that many people like you would like to simply call "Linux"
I'd call Debian GNU/Linux "Debian", or "Debian Linux" if I were introducing it to someone that may have heard "Linux" but may not know specific distributions. If I ever had the need to, I'd call the Debian with an alternate kernel "Debian BSD" or something.
Names are important and the situation has not taken care of itself.
I disagree, for most cases. I've never seen a practical case of: "Ohhhhh, you wanted *GNU*/Linux. Sorry, I loaded Android/Linux on your computer!" or "I thought you meant Debian GNU/BSD, not Debian GNU/Linux!" If/when cases like that become a practical concern, I'll start specifying distro+userspace+kernel. Until such time, I'll stick with my current, sufficiently-unambiguous ways.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
True. However, does Richard Stallman now seem so stupid for asking that everyone call "Linux" systems "GNU/Linux" systems? We now have Android/Linux as well as GNU/Linux, so the distinction actually turns out to be a rather important one to make. Everyone likes to joke about how RMS is a crackpot with bad hygeine, but it seems he's been right more often than not.
Being a crackpot and being right aren't mutually exclusive. Remember what they say about broken clocks being right twice a day.
The Gospel according to lolcat
And you want it to run Leisure Suit Larry 4 too right?