[9fans] Mini PCs

[Comeau At9Fans]

Ok, so, unless I was asleep at the wheel following these

discussions, there's been a few "mini PCs" to come about lately:

* Raspberry Pi

* Cotton Candy

* Mele A1000

* MK802

We have a small number of the latter (MK802 running Android 4.0,

which claims to have a Allwinner ARM A10 1.5Ghz Cortex-A8 processor)

for sale FWIW.  I mention this as LINUX is making its way onto some

of these devices, er computers, so I expect that Plan 9 has possibilities

here too.

--

Greg Comeau / 4.3.10.1 with C++0xisms now in beta!

Comeau C/C++ ONLINE ==>     http://www.comeaucomputing.com/tryitout

World Class Compilers:  Breathtaking C++, Amazing C99, Fabulous C90.

Comeau C/C++ with Dinkumware's Libraries... Have you tried it?

[Richard Miller]

> * Raspberry Pi

At least two 9fans are in the order queue for one of these.

[Matthew Veety]

On Jun 11, 2012 10:03 AM, "Richard Miller" <9f...@hamnavoe.com> wrote:
>
> > * Raspberry Pi
>
> At least two 9fans are in the order queue for one of these.
>
>

I think three including me actually. The drivers factor might only make it a good cpu server methinks. I would totally love one as a terminal though.

--
Veety

[erik quanstrom]

> I think three including me actually. The drivers factor might only make it
> a good cpu server methinks. I would totally love one as a terminal though.

sadly, the 10/100 ethernet is provided through a flakey usb hub
(http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=7380)

for me, that's three strikes (less than gbe, usb, flakey) but in this
case the first strike was enough to exclude it from consideration.

- erik

[Ethan Grammatikidis]

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 18:19:20 -0400
Comeau At9Fans <comeau...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok, so, unless I was asleep at the wheel following these
> discussions, there's been a few "mini PCs" to come about lately:
>
> * Raspberry Pi
> * Cotton Candy
> * Mele A1000
> * MK802
>
> We have a small number of the latter (MK802 running Android 4.0,
> which claims to have a Allwinner ARM A10 1.5Ghz Cortex-A8 processor)
> for sale FWIW. I mention this as LINUX is making its way onto some
> of these devices, er computers, so I expect that Plan 9 has possibilities
> here too.
>

I'm still waiting for the Zaurus port somebody did last year or so. ;)
Well, I'm not exactly waiting. He said something about "performance
problems" which I can believe. Use a couple of pipes (foo|bar|baz) in
the Z's native Linux and it about halves the useful performance, so I
can't imagine Plan 9 doing well on it. Inferno would probably do better.

[Winston Weinert]

On Sun, 2012-06-10 at 18:19 -0400, Comeau At9Fans wrote:
> * Raspberry Pi
> * Cotton Candy
> * Mele A1000
> * MK802

Some other _pricier_ products to consider (and a larger variety of
integrated components):
* Beagleboard
* Beaglebone
* Pandaboard
* Pico-ITX formfactor x86 motherboard

[John Floren]

Some of these should work already; /sys/src/9/omap/beagle seems to
indicate that you can already boot a beagleboard, for instance. As for
anything not based on the supported SoCs, well, until people stop
sitting on ass saying "boy that would be a nice terminal" and actually
start PORTING the damn thing, it'll never be more than Yet Another
120-message 9fans Thread.

I got the Efika Smarttop through quite a bit of the early boot over
the course of an afternoon, before finally getting pissed off at
having to re-write an SD card every time I iterated the kernel. It
shouldn't be *too* hard to get a minimally functional system, the code
in /sys/src/9 is quite good. Oh, there's another thing, for the love
of god don't buy a system that can't netboot, it's just not worth it.

Or we could ignore all these and, in grand 9fans tradition, start
talking about a port to some hardware platform that's been dead for
over 5 years. SPARC64 et al are sorta played out by now, but I've got
a PDP-11 just sitting around...


john

[Tharaneedharan Vilwanathan]

what about teg2 for which geoff announced support recently?

btw, i have two raspberry pi at home now. i would like to run plan9
and inferno (at least emu) on it as soon as possible.

dharani

[Nick LaForge]

> sadly, the 10/100 ethernet is provided through a flakey usb hub

I think the 'cheap arm dev board' bandwagon will always suffer in this
regard, since the phones these SoCs were designed for don't even come
close to needing gbe

[John Floren]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 9:38 PM, Nick LaForge <nickl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> sadly, the 10/100 ethernet is provided through a flakey usb hub
>
> I think the 'cheap arm dev board' bandwagon will always suffer in this
> regard, since the phones these SoCs were designed for don't even come
> close to needing gbe
>

Guruplug?

[erik quanstrom]

On Tue Jun 12 00:39:16 EDT 2012, nickl...@gmail.com wrote:
> > sadly, the 10/100 ethernet is provided through a flakey usb hub
>
> I think the 'cheap arm dev board' bandwagon will always suffer in this
> regard, since the phones these SoCs were designed for don't even come
> close to needing gbe

http://xkcd.com/731/

- erik

[Kurt H Maier]

Are you saying that if we are willing to drown, we can have cheap
reliable gigabit connections?

Why do I have to invent a point to your message?

[Nick LaForge]

Sure. But the Sheevaplug (same SoC) is now 3 years old, and it looks
like the whole 'plug-computer' thing never took off. Since phones
seem to be the only consistent market for fast Arm SoCs, we're likely
to see one with usb3 before gbe. But I'll shut up now in deference to
somebody with actual experience.

[Kurt H Maier]

Evaluations of the Sheevaplug in particular revealed it tended to
overheat badly if you put any significant load on the networking
components. Heating problems combined with poor quality control would
be my guess as to why that whole thing never flew.

[Charles Forsyth]

"failure of vision"

[Kurt H Maier]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 01:08:38AM -0400, Charles Forsyth wrote:
> "failure of vision"
>

I think a sunken ship and an unidentified attack vessel are about as
much use to a man stranded on a tiny island as high-throughput wired
networking is to low-power compute devices.

[erik quanstrom]

the man says there's nothing to see here. he does not say, there's nothing
useful here.

if you look back at the history of plan 9, they didn't say, "how could we possibly
use this slow worm storage," they figured out inovative ways to use it.

i'd aspire to be like that.

- erik

[r...@hemiola.co.uk]

Well, I'm the zaurus 'somebody'. You're welcome to the kernel source,
and I can provide some help with getting it going. For my purposes,
performance is pretty sprightly. I still use it for writing or reviewing
the odd bit of code or text editing. Yes, viewing pdf's is slow
but I assume that is because of the floating point emulation.

The kernel boots from the flash in place of the linux one. I
formatted the internal microdrive with kfs. Wifi with wep works
ok on a cf card. Sound playback works (the internal speaker is
pretty poor!). Cache coherence problems defeated me on the usb
drivers, but I very nearly finished a driver for the sdcard, and
got some way with a flash driver, which would have been useful to
update the kernel from within plan9. It is all based on the bitsy
code, so is probably some way out of line with the current
arm developments.

-rod

[Richard Miller]

> btw, i have two raspberry pi at home now. i would like to run plan9
> and inferno (at least emu) on it as soon as possible.

If the π is running linux, emu shouldn't be difficult to get going.
Try building with SYSTARG=Linux OBJTYPE=arm and see how far you get.

[Kurt H Maier]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 01:47:17AM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote:
>
> i'd aspire to be like that.
>

I look forward to your hardware offerings

[Lluís Batlle i Rossell]

I'm very happy with my Sheevaplug. It works with heavy cpu loads (full gnu
system builds from time to time) for days, and works very good. It's serving me
very well already three years I think.

I've it connected to a 100Mbps switch though, no gigabit.

I've replaced capacitors in its power supply twice, though - they blew up. I
think the power supply is not very well designed, but those big capacitors are
cheap.

Regards,
Lluís.

[Wes Kussmaul]

> http://xkcd.com/731/

When you send an xkcd link to a large list, you make a dent in the
world's productivity. You can't look at just one.

[hiro]

On 6/12/12, Nick LaForge <nickl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sure. But the Sheevaplug (same SoC) is now 3 years old, and it looks
> like the whole 'plug-computer' thing never took off. Since phones

mhm, kirkwood right? I think the dockstars and it's competition on the
"small home server" market pretty much did take off.

[hiro]

ah btw, my dockstar has gigabit ethernet. and my iomega iconnect does too.
the bottleneck is always USB 2.0 for me, but there are two-core NAS
nowadays at Aldi for 50 euros (with SATA and gige).

I think there's a lot to chose from if you're willing to write the drivers.
The mk802 seems very promising to me. I gave up on the rasberry scammers.

sent from my windows 98.

[David Leimbach]

I have a guruplug I've got very little time for, but getting Plan 9 on it was no problem.  I don't do anything with heavy CPU or network usage on Plan 9 anyway.  I'm a bit surprised at the thermal problems, and I believe there was a promise to address them, but I lost interest.

Dave

 

Regards,
Lluís.

[Lluís Batlle i Rossell]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 06:48:22AM -0700, David Leimbach wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 12, 2012, Lluís Batlle i Rossell wrote:
> > I'm very happy with my Sheevaplug. It works with heavy cpu loads (full gnu
> > system builds from time to time) for days, and works very good. It's
> > serving me
> > very well already three years I think.
>
>

> I have a guruplug I've got very little time for, but getting Plan 9 on it
> was no problem. I don't do anything with heavy CPU or network usage on
> Plan 9 anyway. I'm a bit surprised at the thermal problems, and I believe
> there was a promise to address them, but I lost interest.

For what I know, they took back the first guruplugs, that got burnt soon. Then
they fixed them adding a fan.

And globalscale now advertises the DreamPlugs as "without internal
moving parts", in contrast to the fan they had to add to the guruplug.

[erik quanstrom]

release will be at vmworld in august.

- erik

[Bakul Shah]

I have a different view on this.

Boards like the RaspberryPi are just fine as a hobbyist
hardware hacking/embedded platform. At $25 to $35 a pop I can
buy a bunch of them and put them to different uses.

If you design any small board with a few ICs & a microproc, it
can end up costing in the same range or more in parts alone
(even if you make a few hundred to sell, per board cost will
not be much lower). With the raspi I only have to add app
specific logic if needed. Sure, I wish they'd done a bunch of
things differently and I wish it was more open and the USB
core they used had proper documentation etc. but it has plenty
of good stuff I can alreay use that I can't get as cheaply
elsewhere.

But I'd rather run plan9 on it than Linux. I am attempting a
port but don't let that stop anyone else from trying. If you
are working on a port or you want to collaborate, please
contact me off the list. I can certainly use all the help I
can get and there is no point in duplication of effort if it
can be avoided.

[erik quanstrom]

On Tue Jun 12 13:27:58 EDT 2012, ba...@bitblocks.com wrote:
> I have a different view on this.
>
> Boards like the RaspberryPi are just fine as a hobbyist
> hardware hacking/embedded platform. At $25 to $35 a pop I can
> buy a bunch of them and put them to different uses.

good points.

> If you design any small board with a few ICs & a microproc, it
> can end up costing in the same range or more in parts alone
> (even if you make a few hundred to sell, per board cost will
> not be much lower).

definately.

> With the raspi I only have to add app

unfortunately for me, none of the apps i've got in mind
work well with that h/w.

- erik

[Harri Haataja]

Here's another Kirkwood box with GbE that can run Linux apparently:

http://zyxel.nas-central.org/wiki/Category:NSA-310

http://forum.nas-central.org/viewtopic.php?f=249&t=5145

http://www.zyxel.com/products_services/nsa310.shtml

(I noticed because it was for sale here for less than the price of the
disk alone.)

--
I appear to be temporarily using gmail's horrible interface. I
apologise for any failure in my part in trying to make it do the right
thing with post formatting.

[Yaroslav]

2012/6/12 Wes Kussmaul <w...@authentrus.com>:

> When you send an xkcd link to a large list, you make a dent in the
> world's productivity. You can't look at just one.

You have no idea how much right you are!

[Stephen Wiley]

Another pretty good mini pc IMHO is the amazon kindle touch. Leetspete from #inferno helped me get inferno on it (and the graphics will probably work once I get twm on it too) it's supper cheap (the ad supported one costs 75 bucks!) and has a ridicules battery life. The firmware is also open source and there is a tool that let's you boot arbitrary images over usb on it :). I plan to give porting plan9 to that a shot at some point (in my "free time" :S)

--Stephen Wiley
sww...@gmail.com

[Comeau At9Fans]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 12:08 PM, Ethan Grammatikidis <eek...@fastmail.fm> wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 18:19:20 -0400
Comeau At9Fans <comeau...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok, so, unless I was asleep at the wheel following these
> discussions, there's been a few "mini PCs" to come about lately:

>
> * Raspberry Pi
> * Cotton Candy
> * Mele A1000
> * MK802
>

> We have a small number of the latter (MK802 running Android 4.0,
> which claims to have a Allwinner ARM A10 1.5Ghz Cortex-A8 processor)
> for sale FWIW.  I mention this as LINUX is making its way onto some
> of these devices, er computers, so I expect that Plan 9 has possibilities
> here too.
>

I'm still waiting for the Zaurus port somebody did last year or so. ;)
Well, I'm not exactly waiting. He said something about "performance
problems" which I can believe. Use a couple of pipes (foo|bar|baz) in
the Z's native Linux and it about halves the useful performance, so I
can't imagine Plan 9 doing well on it. Inferno would probably do better.

I'm not trying to compare Plan 9 with LINUX here but saying this, and, I'm still trying to get syncronized on the story, but at least LINUX can survive on the MK802.  There has been some complaints about speed, however, I also understand that was with the first generation of them and that the current lot being released this week addressed that.  We shall see shortly.

--

Greg Comeau / 4.3.10.1 with C++0xisms now in beta!

Comeau C/C++ ONLINE ==>     http://www.comeaucomputing.com/tryitout

World Class Compilers:  Breathtaking C++, Amazing C99, Fabulous C90.

Comeau C/C++ with Dinkumware's Libraries... Have you tried it?

[Comeau At9Fans]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 11:46 AM, erik quanstrom <quan...@quanstro.net> wrote:

> I think three including me actually. The drivers factor might only make it
> a good cpu server methinks. I would totally love one as a terminal though.

sadly, the 10/100 ethernet is provided through a flakey usb hub

(http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=7380)

for me, that's three strikes (less than gbe, usb, flakey) but in this
case the first strike was enough to exclude it from consideration.

I think that's a significant point, if similar turns out to be the case with many of these devices, certainly for use with something "critical".  That said, I also think there's nothing wrong with these kind of "stick" PC's for lots of purposes, even if for fooling around.  That said :), enough stuff is already flakey that has mass appeal/use, etc (not saying these have mass appeal, just just sayin').

[Comeau At9Fans]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 1:05 AM, Nick LaForge <nickl...@gmail.com> wrote:

Sure.  But the Sheevaplug (same SoC) is now 3 years old, and it looks
like the whole 'plug-computer' thing never took off.  Since phones
seem to be the only consistent market for fast Arm SoCs, we're likely
to see one with usb3 before gbe.  But I'll shut up now in deference to
somebody with actual experience.

I'm pretty sure what you're saying is at least partially true, if not even more.  I'm also still not sure even these current crop will suffice.  But if nothing else, there is at least now a springboard, so at least whether it make sense to jump off it will at least be more tested.

 

[Comeau At9Fans]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 5:07 PM, John Floren <jo...@jfloren.net> wrote:

...As for

anything not based on the supported SoCs, well, until people stop
sitting on ass saying "boy that would be a nice terminal" and actually
start PORTING the damn thing, it'll never be more than Yet Another
120-message 9fans Thread.....

That's not my thing at the moment, but, if anybody is serious AND capable, I'm probably willing to provide an MK802 to that person once our second lot comes in (I hope on Tuesday).

[Comeau At9Fans]

I also understand some of these other thingies have heating problems too, but that they're being addressed and believe at least in the just sent out batch of MK802's (I said second generation in the other message, that's probably not a fair characterization) it is supposed to be either fixed or at least alleviated.

[crazy...@gmail.com]

On Monday, June 11, 2012 6:19:20 AM UTC+8, Comeau At9Fans wrote:
> Ok, so, unless I was asleep at the wheel following these
> discussions, there's been a few "mini PCs" to come about lately:
>
>
> * Raspberry Pi
> * Cotton Candy
>
> * Mele A1000
> * MK802
>
>
> We have a small number of the latter (MK802 running Android 4.0,
> which claims to have a Allwinner ARM A10 1.5Ghz Cortex-A8 processor)
> for sale FWIW.  I mention this as LINUX is making its way onto some
>
> of these devices, er computers, so I expect that Plan 9 has possibilities
> here too.
>

> --
>
> Greg Comeau / 4.3.10.1 with C++0xisms now in beta!
> Comeau C/C++ ONLINE ==>     http://www.comeaucomputing.com/tryitout
>
> World Class Compilers:  Breathtaking C++, Amazing C99, Fabulous C90.
> Comeau C/C++ with Dinkumware's Libraries... Have you tried it?

I preferred android os system, so I brought one piece MK802 mini android

pc from http://miniandroidpc.com. It makes my TV to be a Internet/Smart

TV. So far it works well and I like it very much!

[Comeau At9Fans]

Yes, and they're evolving so it'll be interesting to see how they take shape, get used, etc.  We still have a few left (via http://www.EnvyThisStuff.com ) and still have the offer to provide one to somebody who is serious about and capable of porting Plan 9 to it.

[Nicolas Bercher]

On 11/06/2012 16:03, Richard Miller wrote:
>> * Raspberry Pi
>
> At least two 9fans are in the order queue for one of these.

+1, I received mine a few days ago. I can't wait to give a try to Plan9
on it!

Nicolas