Suitable hardware???

[rsl360]

Some Nagasaki MS-2100 300Mhz Computers have shown up on ebay. Apparently these are old openbrick units, with a Geode GX1 processor. These look like they would be perfect for running firefly/mtdaapd, except I’m not sure if they have enough speed. It looks like they do, I’m just not sure. Or perhaps there is some other issue? They look great, one could put the OS on the flash drive, run it entirely in memory and keep the music on a hard disk.

Robbie

[EVILRipper]

The popular NSLU2 (standard) has a 133MHz proc.
So I have no idea why 300MHz wouldn’t be suitable. 🙂
How many RAM does it have? (Shouldn’t be a problem, I’m just curious)

[rsl360]

The Nagasaki has a different processor, a Geode GX1, whereas the nslu2 has an Intel XScale IXP420 ARM. Strictly speaking, I thought it was only appropriate to compare speeds between processors of the same type or class. The ones on Ebay have 128 meg of memory, but they accept up to 256.

[fizze]

Well, the slug has whooping 32MB of RAM 😉

Oh, and more recent models of the NSLU2 are clocked at 266Mhz. But also 133Mhz are suitable for firefly. It may not be a speed demon, but it serves the purpose. And it keeps the electricity bill low 🙂

So a Geode should definitely work, since it’s x86-based and even has an FPU. 8)

[rsl360]

Ah, FPU, that should help.

I’ll probably get one or two of these. I’ve found a number of comments on the internet where folks have loaded various linux’s with no problems So yeah, it looks like it will work. The odd this is no one is buying them. They have been posted on Ebay before and _none_ of them sold. They seem like a real good deal. I just wonder if I’m fooling myself somehow. As they say, if it seems to good to be true……..

[fizze]

You’ll find out that there are very few embedded device fans out there. Most of them go for Infrant devices or something fancy. Very few people actually assemble a NAS/home server from a custom device. While it’s more fun, I can see why 😉

[Anonymous]

I’ve got a good Sun Qube collection running sillent in the book shelfs 😉
Might try installing Firefly on the boxes, once I given up playing with the MyBook.

[mas]

Basically if you can get a working compiler environment on the systems then it should be possible to compile the neccessary bits on it.

Thats a bit of work though as you need not only compile mt-daapd on it but also a couple of libraries and such need to be installed first before compiling mt-daapd will work.

Other than that the speed and ram will certainly suffice. Is the energy consumption small enough to recommend running these units as servers. Everything using >30W you should forget immediately. The NSLU is like 10W usage.

[Author]

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