[TriLUG] One Board PCs Like the RPi

Roy Vestal rvestal at trilug.org
Thu Feb 21 10:21:35 EST 2013


I was looking at redsleeve as an alternative to centos ;)

-Roy

On 2/20/13 10:23 AM, John Vaughters wrote:
> The Olimex or the R-Pi both use ArchLinux. I would recommend that you consider ArchLinux instead of RH or Centos. I am a RH guy too, but in the ARM processing world, I think you will find ArchLinux taking a large leap in support. They have many of the solutions you will want that you are used to in RH.
>   
> However, I would be weary of using an SD card device in such a critical application. Consider using something like Smoothwall and an old pc with new hard drive if this is a critical pass through device. Smoothwall supports DansGaurdian if I remember correctly. This will save you tons of time in set up and configuration. You may find other distibutions like Smoothwall also.
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Pete Soper <pete at soper.us>
> To: trilug at trilug.org
> Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2013 2:43 PM
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] One Board PCs Like the RPi
>
>
> On 02/19/2013 02:12 PM, John Mitchell wrote:
>> Humm,
>>
>> Pi = 512 Meg Ram, 1 GHz, $35.00  about 250,00 users
> I think the sales estimate at this point is over a million. The factory in England was making 16k/week last I heard and arrangements have been made for the Chinese to manufacture a supply for their own people.
>> OM = 64 Meg Ram, 454 MHz, $59.38  about ?? users
>>
>> Duh!
> The Linux port is likely to be very constrained with only 64mb of RAM. On the other hand, the Olimex board has very rich GPIO.  (I like Olimex a lot. IMO they make great stuff.) Unfortunately, GPIO is absolutely irrelevant to a Squid server, right? Tell us the truth: You want the weekend cat food dispenser capability for when you're at the beach. The cheaper board has no wired ethernet, but (if memory serves) provision for a WIFI chipset. It's been my experience that the actual performance of WIFI vs published performance in comparison to wired ethernet is similar to the actual performance of government vs X where X is anything except an opossum crossing the road or somebody with two freeway transponders in their car.
>
> I would mention Beaglebone/Beagleboard, but the price of those is out of sight compared to RPI.
>
> IMO a used laptop might be worth considering.  Although the RPI can be set up with nothing but power supply and network connection and remotely accessed through a full GUI desktop, there's something to be said for a keyboard you can actually type on and a display you can actually look at when the LAN is screwball, power is flakey, etc. And the power dissipation isn't too bad. My old G4 Powerbook sucks around 13 watts and can still do work.
>
> -Pete




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