Full Debian ARM for Under $200 233
An anonymous reader writes "With minor elbow grease, you can now set yourself up with a complete Debian ARM Linux box for under $200. This is thanks to Peter Korsgaard, who figured out a cool byteswapped kernel hack for the little $99 Linksys NSLU2. Add a $99 USB harddrive, and the tiny, cute, quiet 'Slug' can run any of about 16,000 Debian ARM packages, 24x7, for pennies per month worth of electricity, since ARM is still orders of magnitude more power-efficient than anything x86. Serve files, music, web pages, printers, backups, kernel images, webcams/motion detection, firewalls/routers, wireless access point... or whatever. Oh, did I mention you can overclock the Slug?"
Stereo component (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Linux Sucks! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, did I mention, VHS sucks ass? I mean, come on, there's no excuse with Beta around.
Guess who lost that one! Just because it's the best techology, doesn't mean it's going to get used.
Re:I've been waiting for this! (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought that was SCO's [caldera.com] trademark.
Re:I've been waiting for this! (Score:3, Insightful)
Come again? I'll give you cheaper and more energy efficient but let's not get carried away. I bet you lose the energy efficiency once you plug in an external USB hard drive too.
Apples to Oranges... (Score:4, Insightful)
Since both the NSLU2 and the Mac Mini support USB2, I don't really understand how one would have faster disk I/O than the other. Now, certainly, there can be questions about file system efficiency, but you could also say that the Mac Mini (for, granted, 5x the price) could have much faster I/O, since you have 256MB of RAM instead of 32MB for things like read-caching.
more stable
I'm very interested as to why the NSLU2 would be more stable than a Mac Mini. Personally, I think the short, square design of the Mini is more stable than the tall, tower design of the NSLU2. From a software standpoint, I'd say the two are rather comparable in stability for comparable activities (i.e., no complaining about 3D games crashing on the Mini when the NSLU2 doesn't even have a graphics chip).
more flexible
While the Mini's certainly not a flexibility powerhouse, I don't see the NSLU2 beating it out here, either. Software flexibility? Mac OS X has a lot of software available, both commerical and software libre (GPL/BSD). You can also run GNU/Linux on the Mini, including the Debian distribution with apt-get.
Not to mention the ability to hack it when I want (The warranty is already void!).
Open your Mini and replace the hard drive. Voila, both can be hacked at will because the warranty is void! ^__^
"Debian ARM only supports little-endian" ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't Debian run on PPC?
What exactly are the applications that depend on the backass ints?
Re:Stereo component (Score:4, Insightful)
Or use the Unslung [nslu2-linux.org] distribution instead, which does support the built-in Ethernet.
Re:x86 power consumption (Score:3, Insightful)
What would be interesting also is comparing the SpecInt (and also SpecFP for fun) of these two processors..
Clock speed isn't a good performance indicator: traditionnaly RISCs have been more powerful than x86 at a given clockspeed, but I don't know if this is the case here.