Universal Linux-based Internet Appliance

This is an interesting one: 3ilinux is working on a sort of generic embeddable Linux box. Basically, they've handled much of the engineering, and they'll help vendors who want to make low cost Embedded Linux routers and what have you's. The hardware is 386 or 486 based, and can have ether, modems, buttons, and LCD displays. And of course it runs Linux from 4MB of flash memory.

Comments

Some pictures

[Money__]

The entire unit (jpg 51k)
With daughter board removed (jpg 59k)
With daughter board flipped over (jpg 61k)

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What about PC104?

[smurd]

Any "Internet Appliance" will probably need A/D, D/A and digital IO to do anything useful. What does the UID buy you other then the drivers for the neat LCD, buttons and the included modem?

PC104 stuff has been around for years and has a good complement of add on cards for IO, ethernet and analog.

check out http://www.pc104.com or (sorry about the name, but they're in the same $300 price range) http://www.winsystems.com

It's not that difficult to roll your own with a boot/root image and loadlin. Most included software will take a floppy image and create a bin file to burn into eprom. If you are willing to do an initial M$DOS boot you don't even need any special drivers or kernels, a standard distribution boot/root/rescue works fine as a starting point.

Re:Why on Earth?

[Gurlia]

Hmm, interesting point. With Linux riding the all the hype and penetrating all kinds of markets, I'm beginning to get the feeling that some people are shoe-horning Linux into where something else might be more appropriate (flameshield on...).

Standard disclaimer: I've nothing against Linux, in fact I use it exclusively and I love it... but... although the nice thing about using Linux for embeddables like this is that you get open standards (rather than locked-down markets that MS would love to have), don't you think this is getting a little out of hand?? I don't believe in one-size-fits-all (as can be seen in MS's case). Sure, Linux is flexible, configurable, and all that, but IMNSHO embeddables would do better to have a system *designed* for the task. Why take a PC OS and shoe-horn it into an embeddable??

Now of course, the flip-side is that using Linux means that these devices will have open standards, which is always a good thing... but the argument still holds: what's preventing us from writing an *open source*, dedicated system designed for this task??