CentraLUG Notes, 8-Jan-2008, Bruce Dawson and low-power Linux machines
Ted Roche
tedroche at tedroche.com
Tue Jan 8 10:08:44 EST 2008
Thanks to Bruce Dawson and Carol Soule for opening up their home for the
January meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as
usual on the first Monday of each month. Our regular haunts, the New
Hampshire Technical Institute's Library, was closed for winter break,
and I doubt there were many spaces left open in the state, what with 46
presidential candidates clambering all over for those last minute votes.
Today is primary day, so remember: vote early, vote often!
Seven attendees made it to the meeting. Bruce had taken quite some
effort to move a lot of his network to the meeting room, and had labels
and fact sheets for a number of devices. He had:
- and older Koolu with a 30 Gb drive and a dual head display: it's a
Geode based machine that "feels" around 600 - 800 Mhz, with 1 Gb RAM,
Ubuntu on the hdd, and Xfce as the desktop. While no speed demon, the
machine takes an incredibly small amount of power to run and can serve a
lot of useful functions from thin client to headless server. Bruce used
the machine to ssh into:
- a LinkSys WTLS54GS, an XScale processor running at around 250 Mhz with
32 Mb RAM and a Linux image burned into Flash. This device has a
built-in USB port, and through a hub was running 300 Gb work of disk
drives and a memory card reader! Speaking of storage, Bruce also had...
- a LinkSys NSLU network storage unit: a 100 Mhz Linux computer whose
HDD had stopped working, perhaps due to stage fright), but a simple
little low-wattage computer Bruce used in their small office as a
network time server, NFS and Samba server. It also had a USB connection
with outboard HDD support.
- a LinkSys WRT56G v 1.1, one of the early models: switch, router,
wireless access point (b/g) and general purpose computer.
- an embedded "Java on a Chip" computer in DIMM form. A very rugged form
factor, rated for use from -30 to +150 degrees Fahrenheit, Bruce is
looking to outfit some of his farm equipment with similar devices.
- a brand-new, never taken out of the book Koolu which Bruce opened and
we admired with appropriate "OOhs" and "Ahs!" What a bunch of hardware
addicts!
Bruce was not the only one to bring hardware to show-and-tell.
Bill Freeman brought along a single computer-on-a-board: ARM9 processor,
ethernet, USB, PC103 connection, serial, and individual A/D interfaces.
He used it in a recent project and is looking at refitting it into a car
computer.
Bill McGonigle also brought a couple of machines to show off: Iliad
Devices provides its customers with a firewall based on BSD and pfSense
in a very nice small-form-factor appliance-box: a Via C7 low-power
fanless motherboard, 3 GigE network connections and lots of auxilliary
but unused connections (sound, PS/2 mouse, etc.). Hooking two of the
devices up using the built-in Firewire-400 connections provides a
heartbeat and very rapid failover for high-availability firewall and
routing. Bill's clients get great reliability and a programmable
interface capable of all of the router functionality in You-Know-Who's
routers at a fraction of the cost. Very impressive!
Bill McGonigle also brought what might have been the smallest and
lowest-power of the devices that night, a Nokia N810 Internet tablet.
What a sweet little machine: around 3" x 5", not half-an-inch thick,
800x600 touch color screen, web browser, email client, wireless,
bluetooth and built-in GPS. Wow.
Thanks to Bruce and Carol for their hospitality, and to Bruce for
tearing apart his network to show us all the cool toys. Thanks to all
for participating and bringing interesting toys to show.
Our next meeting should be at the NHTI Library, Room 146 on February 4th
at 7pm, but keep an eye on the -announce list for official word. David
Berube, well-known local Linux advocate, LUG activist, software
developer and book author will be talking about Ruby on Rails; should be
a great show! Hope to see you there.
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