http://www.osnews.com/story/11249/Picotux_-_the_Smallest_Linux_Computer_in_the_World Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 22 May 2013 02:48:23 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread?5358 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5358 A beowulf cluster of these. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 13:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5359 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5359 Height:19 mm

Width:19 mm

Deep:36 mm Sun, 17 Jul 2005 13:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ma_d) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5360 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5360 i wonder if i can get this to act as a router of some sort if i can get it to handle two ethernet connections.

maybe it dont have the cpu of that tho. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (hobgoblin) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5361 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5361 Might be funny to put a webserver on it and get instant feedback from devices..or make it log network activity "straight from the cow's mouth". Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Rodrigo) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5362 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5362 What is a realistic use for such a device? Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (justin) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5363 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5363 A beowulf cluster of 50mhz systems... BLAZING!

- j Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (justin) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5364 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5364 Network monitoring, device monitoring, telnet, webserver... Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Rodrigo) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5369 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5369 Not quite as small but pretty cool:
http://www.littlechips.com/ Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zizban) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5370 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5370 The thing is though, I'd be really scared of losing it. I guess at any rate, you've got some very good reasoning to have it if you do buy it. The price is $240 USD which is a fair amount of cash. I guess telnet could control it via ethernet if you wanted to instead of using the null modem. Is it possible to strip an SSH binary down to a size which would fit on here? I don't think it would be, but it'd be neat to see. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dswain) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5371 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5371 A beowulf cluster of 50mhz systems... BLAZING!

It's 55mhz. That 5mhz makes all the difference. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5376 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5376 Nice!

Anyway for a cluster I'd rather take the chip only and mount 20 or so on a PCB.

- Morin Sun, 17 Jul 2005 15:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5410 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5410 Did you know linux has more than 30 million lines of code !

Do you really need a 'mainframe,server os' for a usb device ?

How about menuet. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 17:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5413 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5413 I was thinking more along the lines of something that can really take advantage of a massively distributed system. QNX, Plan 9, or Inferno would be ideal candidates for that sort of thing. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 17:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (orestes) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5414 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5414 Perhaps systems like these will help RFID adoption on Linux. Seems to be a good match for RFID to me. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 17:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (pythonhacker) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5418 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5418 Dual LAN would make all sorts of interesting out-of-band apps possible with these tiny devices. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 17:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (pravda) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5424 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5424 right on. with 2 LAN jacks, there a bunch of applications, both good and bad. For instance, you could have a tiny firewall or (more likely) you could have a device to sniff data going through a network connection. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 17:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (klynch) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5428 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5428 that only works on slashdot... oh! wait... Sun, 17 Jul 2005 18:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5433 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5433 Much cooler actually. Teeny is neat, but that thing is awesome! Sun, 17 Jul 2005 18:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zombie process) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5434 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5434 Mac Mini eat your heart out! Sun, 17 Jul 2005 18:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5440 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5440 there is no case to protect the machine? Sun, 17 Jul 2005 19:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (collinm) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5465 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5465 Menuet? As in the _x86_ assembly OS?

Might need a little bit of porting to run on this thing, as it has an ARM processor... Sun, 17 Jul 2005 19:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Phil) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5480 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5480 http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8498487406.html

this one gives you the full dual gbit --
http://www.gms4sbc.com/OtherFF.html

gives you an idea if apple had ditched the 5.25" optical drive how small they could have made the mac mini. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 20:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (pravda) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5482 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5482 Just because it has 30 million lines of code, that doesn't mean they'll all be used. You can choose what to compile in and out, so only a small fraction of them would be used for something like this. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 20:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5494 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5494 He just beat me to it. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 21:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Ronald Vos) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5496 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5496 this one gives you the full dual gbit --
http://www.gms4sbc.com/OtherFF.html

What's the price on that one? Those corporate sites are always so unhelpful. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 21:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Ronald Vos) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5506 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5506 The one from GMS is probably expensive. Their Pentium M board was quite expensive if I remember.

Generally any site that does not state the price means "it will cost more than what is reasonable and we need to convince you to pay up".

It may be a better/cheaper bet to go higher volume and get a VIA-based dual LAN board. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 21:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (pravda) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5516 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5516 1. This would be the ideal computer for a toy robot.

2. You could put a network camera+picotux in a RC model car and stream the pictures via WLAN. You could then control the car from the computer. Perhaps also combine it with idea 1. Sun, 17 Jul 2005 21:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kmarius) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5530 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5530 Right, 2 RJ45s and you have a simple firewall or bridge. Slap an IDS or sniffer on it and voila. But its still a bit limited... Sun, 17 Jul 2005 22:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5531 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5531 not to take credit away from your link, but this one beats all of them when it comes to size. It's only as big as an RJ45 connector!

some of those SBCs are really cool and much more powerful. i'd just hate to see the pricetag on them... Sun, 17 Jul 2005 22:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (klynch) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5585 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5585 Okay, so you cannot get a 48-port 10/100 POE switch and plug 48 computers in your computing grid...

However, those SBC machines could easily go in a nice little stack, support GigE, and can run any kind of Linux you want. Today.

Maybe the Lan plug machines have some good uses, but it is hard to imagine what they are vs. the larger micro-itx designs. Mon, 18 Jul 2005 03:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (pravda) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5611 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5611 Is 55 Mhz enough to process the data flowing thorough Gigabit ethernet channel? Mon, 18 Jul 2005 07:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5725 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5725 "What is a realistic use for such a device?"

Industrial monitoring. A lot of industrial devices output by serial. I could see one of these on each machine talking back to a central server updating on each machines status. Mon, 18 Jul 2005 14:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5765 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5765 I used a something similar for a "realtime" network based control system.

http://www.lantronix.com/device-networking/embedded-device-servers/...

wireless would be fun too..

http://www.lantronix.com/device-networking/embedded-device-servers/... Mon, 18 Jul 2005 16:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5917 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5917 How about a gumstix computer, they are pretty small and run linux...

http://www.gumstix.com Mon, 18 Jul 2005 20:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?5960 http://www.osnews.com/thread?5960 But I agree if it had dual RJ45 connectors then it would be useful as a nat/firewall telnet/ssh server. Other wise perhaps a very compact small website. Mon, 18 Jul 2005 21:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Smartpatrol) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?6373 http://www.osnews.com/thread?6373 While this ARM module is undoubtledly very cool, for the cost you don't really get much compute power so its barely worth talking about clustering. For some deep embedded use, it does what it does well enough.

A miniITX format or PC104 or even a full size credit card format has enough space to host a great many smaller cpus and share the peripheral costs.

To get tiny cluster performance that will need a different instruction set (not x86 or ARM) that can be built into FPGA or ASIC and run much faster then it can clustered within that divice and more outside.

The problem will always be that real horsepower will always produce heat, but newer designs are going to be much more efficient at delivering useful work without turning into heating systems. Tue, 19 Jul 2005 20:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (transputer_guy) Comments