Linux computer the size of a thumb drive | Hacker News Reader

Linux computer the size of a thumb drive

arstechnica.com

65 pointsiwwr25 comments

Neat, but the existing plug computers on the market (TonidoPlug and all the other SheevaPlug variants) seem to fulfill the same purpose at half the price. I've had my 3-watt 4-inch Ubuntu ARM plug running nightly server backups and a streaming music server for a year and a half now, and it cost me less than $99.

I bought a SheevaPlug. It's a piece of junk. The actual plug is terrible, I would be afraid that it might slip out of the socket, so a floor surge protector is the only reasonable place to put it.

This at least looks well made.

Mine certainly never fell out of a socket, and you'd want a computer to be plugged into a surge protector anyway. I've been running it continuously as long as I've owned it; it's not a piece of junk. It's a reliable Linux server that uses 3% the power of my laptop and 0.6% the power of my desktop computer... and it was less than $100.

> It's also possible to plug the Cotton Candy into a conventional computer and boot from it like you would from a regular USB mass storage device.

How can you boot an ARM-compiled Linux in a conventional computer?

Boot _from_ it, not _boot it_, I guess. Using it just as a thumb drive.

Why would you do that? To use precious SD storage to install yet another x86 OS to painfully slowly (10-20MB/s and huge latency) boot up another computer, that in 99.99% of the cases already has an OS. And I don't think they implemented a shared storage between such a computer and the embedded one through the USB storage interface.

I think you're actually booting both your computer and the Cotton Candy from their internal storage, then using something like VNC on your computer to access Cotton Candy.

The manufacturer's product page: http://www.fxitech.com/products/

Would be a nice Android development machine if it were possible to get the Android SDK/NDK components built on it somehow ..

Looks like it dual-boots Android and Ubuntu, maybe?

Yes, but we'd have to get the Android SDK/NDK built for Ubuntu-ARM targets. Not impossible, but a fair bit of work ..

Another one? http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs

Okay okay, nearly the size of a thumb drive, but a hell lot cheaper.

Also using a lot less powerful hardware.

The Raspberry Pi is using a BCM2835, a 700MHz single-core ARM11.

The Cotton Candy is using an undisclosed quad-core Cortex A9 at 1.2GHz. The best information I can find points to it being probably an Exynos 4412 with a Mali 400-MP GPU.

The Raspberry is a hell of a lot cheaper because it's a hell of a lot less powerful.

Why so expensive? I would like this as $50 thing, but $199...

RAM, separate GPU+core and profit buy the looks.

The CPU alone is probably $25 in high volume, and these guys are not high volume. (Guesstrapolated from an iSupply teardown of a kindle fire.)

If you want $50 then you are looking at a Raspberry Pi grade CPU. Those are ok for getting data in and out of a H.264 decoder, but you would not mistake them for modern workstation performance. (But good news, they might announce shipping in 15 hours.)

This would be cool if it had a killer suspend feature. Which means that you could plug this out, ride to school, plug it in and continue whatever you were doing.

I actually had a Windows 95 computer that was like that. It had so little RAM that anything I was doing was being cached to the hard drive anyway. If I pulled the plug and then turned it back on, whatever I was typing in Notepad would appear right back on the screen without saving it.

I'm happy to see linux computers being sold at all.

$199? No way. At $75-100, I would think about it.

No built in flash?

None listed in the specs; it has a MicroSD slot for storage.

Ignoring the absolutely horrible name, this will be dead on arrival because of the price alone. Even for a new or small company that doesn't have the industry clout or initial unit production numbers necessary for minimal component pricing, there's just no way to justify a $200 price tag for what appears to be less than $15 worth of actual hardware. Especially when the only significant difference from competing hardware (priced nearly an order of magnitude lower) is wi-fi and what will amount to an unnoticeable performance increase.

Yes, controlling via wi-fi is a nice potential feature, but they would really need to have the appropriate third party software interfaces (Android, iOS, and browser) ready by the ship date. And even then, it is unfortunately not a $165 feature.

If by competing device you mean the Raspberry Pi, I wouldn't consider their hardware to be in the same market. That's like saying the HTC G1 is competing with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. They're generations apart. A 1.2Ghz dual-core processor doesn't come cheap, nor does the 1GB of RAM on top of that.

Your statement that it's only $15 worth of hardware makes me question the validity of everything you say.

It looks like they've gotten access to Samsung's Exynos 4412, which is definitely not a sub-$20 part.

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