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Linux on a SIMM
An anonymous reader wrote in to point out that the uclinux project has an interesting little device on its website. Its
the size of simm and
runs Linux. Costs about $175 and has chips for ether, an LCD panel,
2mb of flash RAM and 8 megs of DRAM. Very cute. Very little. Very
cool.
After looking around for something small and low-power that I could afford, I gave up and did as someone else suggested. I used a laptop with a dead screen.
I actually have 4 laptops all (more or less) the same -- my main one and three others I bought used. One I bought had a busted screen, but I bought it for the memory/battery/power supply.
When I wanted to set up a linux box to serve as my internet gateway, I dug it out, popped the drive into one of my others, loaded linux, and stuck the drive back into the one with the broken LCD. I used one of my SlimSCSI's to connect to a CD-ROM drive to load Linux; it now has two PCMCIA ethernet cards in it.
It's a 486DX2-50 with 8mb of memory and a 340MB hard drive. I think you really need about 500mb, but I managed to fit everything. 8MB of RAM is enough, but I wouldn't complain about more.
By putting the hard drive into another laptop, I was able to use that screen and keyboard, but you could also use an external monitor. In production, it sits on 4 plastic soda bottle caps (for better ventilation) on a shelf in the corner. I have it hooked up to a six-port OmniView switch box, so I can use the exact same monitor/keyboard I'm using right now to work it. I can also telnet to it from any other computer on the network, or from the outside (I have a DSL connection.)
Anyway, it works great, and a working 486 laptop with a broken screen shouldn't be too expensive. Have fun!
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
How many times a month does this need to end up on /. - this is the ucsimm, we all know the ucsimm, we've seen it before. At least two times before this.
And incedentally, it's not just the same size as a simm, it's designed to be clicked into the same single-inline-module socket as a 30 pin simm.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
I realize that; that's one of the many things that would make this a variant
I'd like to see someone integrate an ARM core and a couple of ethernet controller cores on a die for use in a module like this.
If they make a version of this that can handle two or more network interfaces at 100 Mbit, I'm sold.
I don't remember the exact alphabet-soup designation, but isn't the DragonBall the same processor used in the Palm Pilot? I believe it's a Motorola 68000-series processor.
I also recall seeing a version of gcc that worked on this processor. I downloaded and played with it a little bit using a Palm emulator and the ROM image from my friend's Palm III. It seemed to work just fine.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Go to Rebel.com and get yourself a Netwinder. They are small, cost "something like standard x86 prices", and as far as I know, completely fanless. They use a low power StrongARM processor, and if I remember correctly, just use a standard 9V DC power adaptor as its power supply. The whole thing runs in 15 Watts.
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Open mind, insert foot.
I have my suspicions about an 18MHz processor being able to handle a 100BaseT connection. It does take some CPU to do any sort of useful firewall work, unless of course you are just using that connection and utilizing only a fraction of the available bandwidth.
Does anyone know if the processor could handle a 100baseT connection?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Yep. It mentions that on the site along with the fact that you can experiment with their OS code using the copilot Pilot emulator.
A lot of those parts originated in Asia. It's not the transport across the Atlantic which is causing price differences.