[HH] BLU Meeting - Linux on Small Hardware

[Tom Metro]

> Topic: Linux on small hardware
> Moderators:
>     Kurt Keville, Systems Administrator, MIT Clinical Research Center
>     Tom Sohmers
>     Federico Lucifredi
>     Brian DeLacey
>     Michael Larabel, Founder, Phoronix Media

I "live blogged" this on the BLU IRC channel, as I usually do for BLU
meetings I attend. (Not a whole lot of info. Just key phrases and
product names I peck out on my cell phone keyboard.)

Here's a summary of the meeting:

There were technical difficulties getting Federico's computer attached
to the projector, so he headed off to the Apple store to get an adapter.

I'm not sure what the original agenda was supposed to be, but they
shuffled things around and had Michael Larabel, Founder, Phoronix Media,
talk for a bit about ARM devices and a tablet made for developers to
show off the NVIDA Tegra. His site (http://www.phoronix.com/), which
covers Linux hardware, both desktop and ARM devices.

Others mentioned you could get consumer tablets (like the ASUS) running
the NVIDA Tegra for half the price, and were easily unlocked so you
could run other OSs (Ubuntu).

Then Brian DeLacey took the floor and gave an intro for a couple of
videos featuring Kurt Keville demonstrating a 48-node supercomputer
cluster running on solar power, built in a repurposed high-tech trash
can. This was built using $180 (each) Pandaboards, which use a
top-of-the-line Cortex ARM CPU, and was benchmarked at something close
to 48 double-precision gigaflops...a few GFLOPs behind the entry point
for the top 500 supercomputers 6 months ago. (The machines on the list
keep getting faster, so they are further away from the bottom of the
current list.) All that consuming around 200 watts.

Brian mentioned picking up a Coby Android tablet for $120, which he
thought performed pretty well, and thought the $150 ~ $180 Pandaboards
were comparatively overpriced. (There are other Android tablets in the
same price range with even faster CPUs.)

Next up was Federico. He started with a demo of "little bits," which are
modular circuit blocks that you can assemble sort of like LEGOs.
(http://littlebits.cc/, $29 for a starter kit or $89 for a kit like
Federico showed.) There's a Ted talk by the inventor.
(http://www.ted.com/talks/ayah_bdeir_building_blocks_that_blink_beep_and_teach.html)
Federico snapped together a few modules and showed how squeezing a
pressure sensor caused an LED bargraph to vary.

He next showed off a Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/), showed
a close up board view using a USB microscope, and then demoed booting it
to Debian and started up X with the xfce desktop.

Someone at the talk mentioned that one of the RPi developers has created
an accessory board that facilitates adding peripherals, like Arduino
shields (though it didn't sound like it was compatible with Arduino
shields).

Lastly he demonstrated a CuBox computer (http://www.solid-run.com/),
which is impressively packaged as a 2" cube. He showed photos of the
interior, showing how they packed everything in using two stacked PCBs.
It uses a Marvel Armada 510 CPU, which is also an ARM derivative. The
device, like the RPi, also seems aimed at media playback. It has a bit
higher-end hardware than the RPi and is expected to sell for $150 ~
$200, but isn't available yet. He attempted a boot demo, but only
managed to get a flash of a penguin on the screen before the projector
reported no signal.

 -Tom