On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:07:37 +0000 Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk allegedly wrote:
On 12/02/10 13:19, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Funny, Me and Adam were talking about these at the pub meet last night.
512MB is plenty for an embedded application and I note there are SDIO and GPIO ports so adding more flash via a SD card should be fairly trivial.
512MB ought to be enough, I just wasn't sure how much a fairly "standard" distro like the included Ubuntu variant takes up by being filled with "rubbish".
I found someone on eBay selling them new from stock for reasonable prices, who also has a webshop: http://www.newit.co.uk/store/
Only problem I have now is there are too many choices!
I've got one. I bought it from Newit and it was delivered within two days of order. I bought the base model for £89.00. This has ubuntu pre-installed in flash, but I chose to install debian (lenny) onto an SDHC card and boot from that. I also have a 500 Gig USB disk attached for store (the beast is my local apt-mirror for both ubuntu and debian).
I bought it to replace one of my NSLU2 slugs (which I have run for a while now). The slugs are great, but the plug is orders of magnitude faster. I will probably buy more - at that price, why wouldn't you?
I went the lenny route because you don't need to replace the ubuntu installed in flash if you follow Martin's instructions at:
http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/unpack.html
Note that my plug had uboot 3.4.16 installed and any version lower than 3.4.19 doesn't properly support either USB devices or booting from SD cards. Don't make the mistake I did of installing the latest version of uboot (3.4.27) - it doesn't work and you end up with boot failures with the message "Verifying Checksum ... Bad Data CRC". There isn't actually anything wrong with Martin's tarfile, the problem is in the uboot. Installing 3.4.19 (as various fora recommend) fixes the problem.
The really nice thing about playing about with the plug compared to the NSLU2s is the availability of the serial console over the mini-usb connection.
Get one, have fun, and be amazed at what you can do for 89 quid. I mean, serously, I was running Sun SPARC servers in the early 90s which compare badly with the plug.
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