Plug Computers for whole-home audio

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

"Marc Nozell (marc at nozell.com)" <nozell at gmail.com> writes:
>
> On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 11:40 AM, Ken D'Ambrosio <ken at jots.org> wrote:
> > Actually, a confluence of events has me playing with my Sheeva today.  By
> > sheer circumstance, I
> > - Need to replace my bedroom computer with something quiet
> > - Bought a 10-port powered USB hub
> > - Acquired, gratis, a USB-to-VGA converter
> > - Saw a video of someone running Gnome off of a Sheeva plug.
> >
> > It seemed like the perfect setup for my Sheeva to step in.  Unfortunately,
> > for one, as of 9.10(?), Ubuntu no longer supports the Sheeva; they compile
> > for a higher CPU than the Sheeva has.  Then, my 16 GB SD card gave up the
> > ghost.  So I'm installing Debian on a newly acquired card; what with only
> > 512 MB of RAM, I don't anticipate that I'll be making huge inroads into
> > graphical editing or anything, but assuming I get it working as a
> > "workstation," it'll just be DamnCool(tm).
> 
> pro-tip: to save your SD card from excessive writes, look at
> flashybrid. It works well for me.

Actually...:

Your SD card is almost certainly already doing wear-levelling internally,
and can (barring it `just being a bad card', which happens) be expected
to last for *years* even if you write to it with unusually high frequency.
Contrary to popular belief, modern flash disks have *way better reliability*
than HDDs.

I should still have a copy of the explanation that I gave the last time
someone asked me about this (should have posted it online...), but
the ultra-short version is: if you do the math, you'll be surprised--
most of what people `know' about flash memory, which is based on
what was true with the state of the art 20 years ago, is basically
superstition at this point. *Embedded* flash memory is somewhat
of a different story, but then it's more or less standard to implement
software wear-levelling layers between raw flash and anything
that will be generating writes.

So, pro-tip: *do* consider putting a swap partition on your (wear-levelled)
flash disk; you're probably not going to end up using it as `virtual memory'
in the `extra scratch-space for programs to thrash and trash' sense, but it'll
allow allocated-but-*idle* segments memory to be swapped-out and make room
for disk-buffer/-cache. And that can speed things up..., and even
reduce writes to disk :)

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."