Re: build a hack box of choice?

To clarify what I am thinking a little...  What if XYZ company could 
supply you with hardware that is almost like the SOHO router that you 
are porting to, but XYZ company adds widget A to make it hackable.  And 
they try to have a long run without EOLing so fast.

Basically XYZ would obtain or build the super hackable SOHO you want, 
give it to you at a decent price and in a limited way support the 
hacking and Linux porting that you guys do.

-Scott


Bruno Lopes F. Cabral wrote:

> Hello there
>
> there are at least a few initiatives like you're searching for,
> i.e. from seattlewireless.net (Samsung S3C4510B), hri.sf.net
> (Conexant 84200/newer samsungs), actiontec router, ucrouter.ru
> (also Samsung S3C4510B) and so on
>
> all of them try to port linux to SOHO routers(*), which are
> cheap but have the drawback of changed hardware revisions
> so often that one could get a unit with a different processor
> than the one already ported to :^|
>
> I'm with hri.sf.net guys: some info on porting is on-line,
> some is published on the list (we really need to put all
> on-line, sf.net list archive is simply horrible!)... some
> is still undocumented ...
>
> our goal is to make the ports AND PUT THE INFO ON HOW WE
> DID IT available. the boards we're tweaking into have
> serial UARTs available, as JTAG connectors
>
> about books, I read one from O'reilly (Building Embedded
> Linux I think) but it is more on how to build your own
> toolchain(**) than on how to diggle with different hardware
> to start with. I'm in search of a book on _hardware_
> and how to change linux kernel to accomodate it (in case
> anyone knows such a book, I'd like to know)
>
> http://vega.soi.city.ac.uk/~es728/pdf/aleph.pdf
> as a nice doc about how to port linux to a new ARM based
> board. that helped me to solve the uncompressing part
> of linux boot loader (so I get my first cx84200 port
> with ramdisk to SMC7004VWBR rev.1 hardware)
>
> about a cheaper board than soekris, try www.pcengines.ch,
> Geode 233 for US$140 (US$98 in 480 quantities). soekris
> is about US$185-199 for a AMD ELAN 133, which seems too
> much to me ( remember you'll need to add wlan card,
> power supply and case -- that's why HRI project is so
> interesting ;-) )
>
> Cheers
> !3runo
>
> (*) ucrouter.ru actually build their own board. their
> rom can run on many samsung s3c4510b based boxes!
>
> (**) I recomend snapgear.org toolchain. it is available
> for various embedded systems
>
> Scott Serr wrote:
>
>> With all the talk about which new box might be hackable, it seems 
>> obvious that there is a need for something cheap but with the 
>> capabilities of the expensive Soekris boards.
>>
>> I work as a software engineer (IT department doing mostly Java and 
>> web stuff) of an ASIC company.  I know very little about hardware, 
>> but I work with friends that know hardware and know the industry and 
>> the OEM players.
>>
>> My question is...  what needs to be in a box to not just make it 
>> hackable, but be made to hack and put Linux on it?  Also, is there 
>> current hardware (WRT54?) that may have an OEM much like all the 
>> vendors that used the WL11000 based boards?
>> I'm wondering if a rough business model of catering to the Linux-hack 
>> market would work.  Of course I am counting all the applications of 
>> the hacked boxes, otherwise the quantity probably wouldn't be enough.
>
>
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