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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

I miss the time when you could buy a computer that was actually different from an IBM PC...

Just buy a phone.

You know it's not the same. You don't hook up your phone to an external monitor and a full-sized keyboard and you don't run desktop software on it.

OTOH, a current phone could emulate an Amiga in real-time without much effort. I could, conceivably, run an Amiga desktop off any HDMI equipped phone with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

I've been playing with an Insignia Infocast -- basically a trivially rootable, ARM-based Chumby computer that costs 100 bones at Best Buy.

I dunno, bochs is pretty fucking slow on my 3GS...

http://www.lemote.com/en/products/Notebook/2010/0310/112.htm...

All-Free Software (BIOS, firmware) netbook with a Loongson MIPS CPU. RMS uses this.

Also very expensive (350 euro? wtf). You can get an OpenRD for $250, or a Guruplug for $100, or the tiny little Gumstix Overo and a breakout board for something in between. They're all ARM, they're all decent, they all ship with Linux.

Of course, you can still buy SPARC and POWER systems from Sun and IBM, respectively.

If you want a bare-bones ARM, the BeagleBoard is probably the best choice. What I'd really like is a good-quality ARM netbook with Free firmware and BIOS. The Lemote netbook seems to be well-built according to reviews.

The Beagleboard is a little too bare-bones for me, since it lacks onboard ethernet (USB ethernet is no excuse).

At least a Guruplug costs $50 less and has ethernet right onboard.

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