[OLPC-AU] XS Mini - Ionics Plug (Hardware)

[Sameer Verma]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 7:43 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar at laptop.org.au>
> wrote:
>>
>> On 20 June 2011 21:22, Mitchell Seaton <meaton.2v at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi Sridhar/Jerry,
>> > Thought this might be of interests as a potential hardware for XS Mini
>> > application. Some of the specs are on this
>> > address: http://www.ionicsplug.com/nimbus.html is being manufactured in
>> > the
>> > Philippines (my eKindling colleague mentioned it too me), it would be
>> > really
>> > suitable here for XS usage in some of our project (pilot) schools here
>> > in
>> > the Philippines. Seeing that the current version is running on Debian OS
>> > it
>> > may be suitable to likely run Fedora 11 or higher on this device, and
>> > thus
>> > XS Mini. The main issue of course would be storage into 512MB NAND. So
>> > similiar to the old XS-on-XO.
>> > Please let me know your thoughts, and if it is of good interest as a
>> > target
>> > device then maybe we could make one available for testing?
>>
>> Cool idea! It would serve better as an all-in-one device if it had an
>> integrated wireless AP. Maybe we can look into running ejabberd on an
>> OpenWRT-based device.
>>
>> A common difficulty with such devices right now is the CPU. In this
>> case it is a "1.2GHz Marvell processor", which I guess means that it
>> is ARM-based. All versions of XS are currently made for x86. I'd like
>> to see that change, in light of the work done on the ARM-based
>> XO-1.75. That'll take some work.
>>
>

Robert Howard (OLPC-SF) has been working on porting the XS stack over
to ARM. There are some roadblocks from what I understand with ejabberd
and bios-crypto, but he'd have a better answer. Robert has been using
the Open RD Client as a testing base.
http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-35-openrd-ultimate.aspx

The Nimbus is a model in the line of plug computers from Marvell. More
plugs at http://www.plugcomputer.org/

cheers,
Sameer
-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Information Systems
Director, Campus Business Solutions
San Francisco State University
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/
http://cbs.sfsu.edu/
http://is.sfsu.edu/


> The Marvell processor is indeed ARM based but its already very well
> supported in the Fedora ARM project. I suspect its based on the Marvell
> Sheeva Plug or one of its derivative devices. They are quite common and the
> details on the Using ARM [1] page for the Sheevaplug should work. You can
> get the latest release based on F-13 here [2]. It should have all the
> packages needed to run ejabberd on it.
>
> Regards,
> Peter
>
> [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Using
> [2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM#Releases
>
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