Marvell's Plug Computer

[MagicZaurus]

There is a Debian guy who is trying to get Debian working on this Shiva-Plug.

http://www.cyrius.com/journal/debian/ki ... lu2-killer

Interesting device. For Puppy the 512MB Flash and 512MB RAM would be more than enough.

[sullysat]

OKay, so how would one go about installing puppy on something like this? I can see it working well for remote storage, but from a productivity standpoint, how else might it be used?

[Puppyt]

sullysat asked:

OKay, so how would one go about installing puppy on something like this? I can see it working well for remote storage, but from a productivity standpoint, how else might it be used?

I was trawling today regarding upgrading my Toshiba e740-BT from Windows Pocket PC 2002 and found this how-to for installing Puppy-4 on it:
http://www.amazingfacepcb.com/e740/e740 ... 0setup.htm. I think it describes what Dennis was outlining earlier. The e740 uses X-Scale which is apparently compatible with ARM - so I hope I'm not too far off the topic for you here. Backtracking to Spyro's Lair there are links to other examples of Linux installations in various applications that might give you more ideas...
My e740 has both a 2GB SD card and a 4 GB CF card - so I should be able to run Turbopup Xtreme on it - when it arrives in good time - for productivity-plus.

[sullysat]

Thanks Puppyt! I'll take a look.

Sully

[MagicZaurus]

There is a Slackware now available for this device.

http://www.armedslack.org/

Maybe can use that as a base for a Puppy version for ARM. The Slackware port seems to require about 4GB for the OS according to the install instructions.

[rob]

Now that woof has been created, can we just run the woof script from within slackware to create an arm slackware puppy?

[DMcCunney]

I was trawling today regarding upgrading my Toshiba e740-BT from Windows Pocket PC 2002 and found this how-to for installing Puppy-4 on it:
http://www.amazingfacepcb.com/e740/e740 ... 0setup.htm. I think it describes what Dennis was outlining earlier. The e740 uses X-Scale which is apparently compatible with ARM - so I hope I'm not too far off the topic for you here.

Lots of things are compatible with ARM.

ARM, Ltd., is a "fabless" semiconductor company. They design the ARM architecture and instruction set, and license it to hardware vendors who actually make the chips. Intel had the "StrongARM" CPU line, based on the ARM 5 architecture, which they later sold to Marvell Semiconductor to ficus on their own X86 architecture. Motorola also made ARM chips, before spinning of their chip business as Freescale Semiconductor. And IBM and Texas Instruments, among others, are ARM licensees.

ARM CPUs are popular in handheld devices like PDAs and smartphones (my PDA uses a Motorola ARM CPU), and embedded applications. They use a 32 bit core with a powerful instruction set, and a modular architecture so that manufacturers can incorporate only the functionality required by their intended usage. There are ARM based netbooks in development because they also use comparatively low power, and offer good battery life.

The big question with things like this is why use Puppy as a starting point?

Puppy is a flavor of Linux. Properly speaking, Linux is the OS kernel - vmlinuz. The rest of a typical Linux system are the Gnu utilities, X-Windows, and whatever window manager and set of applications the distro chooses to offer.

The first step in a port is getting the Linux kernel running on the new device, along with a base set of utilities. What else you need will depend upon the intended usage. For instance, my Linksys WRT54G router uses an embedded Linux 2.4 kernel with the Busybox utilities implementation to make a working system that will execute in limited RAM. It doesn't include X-Windows or window manager because there is no reason to. If you access the underlying system at all, you do so vi telnet or ssh to a command line. The GUI is the interface to the firmware to let you configure the router, but that's HTML displayed in a browser, and not a window manager requiring X.

I think a lot of the enthusiasm I've seen for porting Puppy to whatever device is misplaced. What makes Puppy Puppy?

It's not the Linux kernel. Any Linux distro uses that. It's not using Busybox instead of full versions of the Gnu utilities to keep the size dowm. Damn Small Linux, TinyCore, and some other flavors also do so for similar reasons. Nor is it really any of the other particular design decisions that make Puppy a distro well suited for low end hardware.

Ultimately, I think what makes Puppy Puppy is an overall "look and feel", but that look and feel is a product of running on PCs, laptops, or notebooks, with keyboard and mouse as the normal method of interacting with the system, and a comparatively large VGA or better screen with X-Windows and (by default) JVM to provide a GUI and let you run applications.

For something like a netbook, that paradigm may translate neatly, For something like a handheld with a much smaller touch screen as primary display and input device, or for a plug computer used for embedded applications, it won't. You might be able to do the port, but what you'll have when you are done arguably won't be Puppy.

(Folks interested should look at the Nokia Internet Tablet line running Linux underneath and the Maemo toolkiit on top. Lots of Linux apps are a real challenge to port to something like that, simply because of the problems in translating an app intended for keyboard, mouse, and big screen to touch screen, thumbboard, and much smaller screen. Mozilla's Fennec browser, currently in beta on the Nokia tablets, is primarily a research project to explore how to optimally use a browser on a screen that small.)

For something like the Marvell Plug, I'd use something like a stable Debian kernel and utilities as a basis, since Debian has already been ported to a number of architectures. Chances are, someone else already got Linux up on the architecture, and my task becomes taking it to the next level.

A lot of what I see on the forums parses as "If what you have is Puppy, you see everything as a dog run". Well, no. Not everything is.
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Dennis