[BlueOnyx:12460] Re: Solarspeed / Compass / BlueOnyx stores

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Dave,

> Also, I understand the complete impracticality of porting something for
> three months that won't feed you or pay your rent. I just wish I had a
> more rounded skill set so I could take it on...

You see, your comment about the Raspberry Pi had me thinking. I looked
up the info on the site, checked the specs and browsed the forums.

With the RPI it's possible to boot from either the onboard SD card, or
from USB:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=34374

Now that may be an USB stick, or an USB attached disk - provided the
disk gets its power from a separate power supply.

It still needs a little bit of tinkering, as you apparently can't make
do without a little FAT32 partition on the USB medium. But the second
partition can be EXT4 and can contain a Linux that you boot via this
round about.

Likewise there is also a Fedora port available for the RPI.

Considering these two facts I think it wouldn't be too complicated or
that time consuming to port BlueOnyx to the Raspberry Pi.

However, the performance might be a bit on the slim side. 512MB RAM,
that slow CPU and the performance of the OS running either off the SD
card or the USB attached medium will probably make it feel like dragging
a boat anchor around.

But all in all it looks like a really interesting gimmick that could be
useful for quite a few purposes. Board, PSU, 8GB SD card and a HDMI->DVI
adapter add up to around 80,- EUR. That's quite a bargain.

Then again, for around 135,- EUR you could get a Mini-ITX board that
just needs a bit of RAM as an extra and uses standard PC components.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber