Normally we don't use this list to promote vendors or sell shit. But a
friend of mine has an extra NailKit for sale (50% off Retail).
http://www.tincantools.com/product.php?productid=16143

I think he's trying to raise a little extra cash for school supplies for
his KIDS and he is asking a fair price. So I figured I'd pass the word
along to this list as ppl from time to time ask for suggestions into
what to buy when starting out with embedded things.
It's ARM. Fun. Unbreakable. Upstream support is awesome. Schematics are
fully open. I own one. So it's fully supported at Gentoo.

If anybody is interested you can contact me and I'll make an e-intro.
Or Chime in here and he can contact you. (tip buying stuff from an
embedded genius/guru is nearly always a good call) I'd buy it off of him
but as noted I already own one..

--
Ned Ludd <solar@gentoo.org>

Ned Ludd wrote:

Normally we don't use this list to promote vendors or sell shit. But a
friend of mine has an extra NailKit for sale (50% off Retail).
http://www.tincantools.com/product.php?productid=16143


I think he's trying to raise a little extra cash for school supplies for
his KIDS and he is asking a fair price. So I figured I'd pass the word
along to this list as ppl from time to time ask for suggestions into
what to buy when starting out with embedded things.
It's ARM. Fun. Unbreakable. Upstream support is awesome. Schematics are

fully open. I own one. So it's fully supported at Gentoo.

If anybody is interested you can contact me and I'll make an e-intro.
Or Chime in here and he can contact you. (tip buying stuff from an
embedded genius/guru is nearly always a good call) I'd buy it off of him
but as noted I already own one..




I like the idea, but they seem a tad expensive when you can get nice
(but larger) boards like PCEngines Alix for a little over half the price?


Not critiquing, but I need a smallish board for an embedded mailserver
project and have looked around for various things which fit the bill.
Alix seems best bang for buck so far?


Ed W

On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 06:30:30PM +0100, Ed W wrote:
> >NailKit
..

> I like the idea, but they seem a tad expensive when you can get
> nice (but larger) boards like PCEngines Alix for a little over half
> the price?

I love the ALIX boards but don't think they are really competing with
tiny ARM systems like the NailKit.


> Not critiquing, but I need a smallish board for an embedded
> mailserver project and have looked around for various things which
> fit the bill.
> Alix seems best bang for buck so far?

Depends on your planned traffic load. The Geode LX is cool and all,
and has decent performance, but it is in no way a throughput monster.

<shameless plug>
If you're going to get an ALIX board I can recommend replacing the
BIOS with coreboot for a completely open source system. There is good
support for a few ALIX boards. http://coreboot.org/
</plug>


//Peter

Peter Stuge wrote:



Not critiquing, but I need a smallish board for an embedded
mailserver project and have looked around for various things which
fit the bill.
Alix seems best bang for buck so far?



Depends on your planned traffic load. The Geode LX is cool and all,
and has decent performance, but it is in no way a throughput monster.

<shameless plug>
If you're going to get an ALIX board I can recommend replacing the
BIOS with coreboot for a completely open source system. There is good
support for a few ALIX boards. http://coreboot.org/
</plug>




Ohh cool! I didn't know of that!



Actually you raise an interesting question - for this project it's a
very low use box, just for a couple of users, but I want as fast boot
time as possible.* Right now I just a basic 2.6 kernel (recommended
.config file appreciated if anyone has any optimisations for Geode -
mine if fairly pared down already though), but it's taking a good 10-15
seconds to boot the kernel which seems quite a bit longer than I would
have expected?* It seems to spend quite a bit of time initialising
hardware (not yet spent any time working on this though - possibly I
still have too much compiled into the kernel.)



If anyone has any notes on increasing kernel boot speed I would be
interested in links.* There are some very old notes on the IBM site
somewhere, but they seem too far out of date to be terribly useful.* I
don't need sub second boot speeds, but it would be useful to get some
idea where the boot time goes?* Does coreboot have anything to help me
get the kernel up faster?



For reference I'm talking about before where I think bootchart helps,
but actually how to get the kernel to initialise faster.* As an aside,
I haven't tried baselayout2+openrc on these Alix boards yet, but on my
main (normal) machines OpenRC transforms the boot times to just a few
seconds - very impressive





Cheers



Ed W