Technologic Systems is offering a freely downloadable, Debian-based Linux OS image said to boot from an SD card in less than two seconds, on the company’s ARM9-based SBC (single-board computer). The TS-7300 SBC targets embedded applications requiring “extreme design security, flexibility, and reliability”, according to the company.
at 128MB SDRAM it is enough to run fvwm and dillo!!!
The reprogrammable FPGA can be used as a cryptographic accelerator.
I’m using the TS-7200 and TS-7250 in projects and you can’t beat the boards for the price.
I’m sure the TS-7300 will be a nice board as well.
There’s an active yahoo mailing list for the ts7200 and there’s a 2.6 port available, as well as NetBSD.
What is the price?
Technologic has the price list for their parts on line.
For the TS7200 it’s at http://www.embeddedarm.com/epc/ts7200-spec-p.php
Replace the ‘7200’ in the url with the model number for the others.
I’ve got a TS-7250 with a USB external hard drive attached to it that, just for giggles, I’ve self-hosted NetBSD on. It takes it a week to build all of NetBSD from source, but it does manage.
This is why you want to cross-compile it from a faster machine and cut it down to less than 2 hours
See http://www.netbsd.org/guide/en/chap-build.html for details.
I use my iMac G5 to build NetBSD’s userland & kernel for my Cobalt Qube2. It’s over 60 times faster at compiling the sources.
There are two reasons to self-host. One is that it used to be the traditional milestone that declared a Unix port to a new machine “finished”, and the other is that it’s a great stress test for the hardware that it exercises.
But yes, the speed difference is why I only did the self host “for giggles.”
targets for RISCOS if it will be opensourced.