Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Co-oincidental to research I'm presently doing on creating control and monitoring systems with web interfaces, I came across an incredible array of miniature computers running Linux or other tinier open source operating systems.

Of general interest, I think to pretty well everyone, would be the Sheeeva Plug, at an amazing US$99 with Linux, 1.2G processor and 512M RAM, together with 512M Flash RAM for website or other storage space. It's also "green" as it consumes less than 5W power.

Another pocket rocket, is the Pogoplug computer, which is positioned as a way to create your personal "Cloud" to overcome some of the privacy and copyright issues associated with using publically available services like Facebook. It appears as if the purchase price at US$129 includes external web support to enable the device to be found behind firewalls without configuration.

If you're into engineering, how about this?

Yes, that IS an ethernet socket!

The rest, is a computer runninig a Linux Webserver!

This amazing device built by Lantronix is a complete webserver, running Linux, of course.

In my view, these are disruptive technologies, both by price, and capability. We are entering the world of ubiquitous computers, which will be placed into service everywhere from smart homes, to factories, to environmental  and scientific data logging. Apparently, the people behind IPv6, had this in mind - IPv6 not only overcomes the Internet address space limitations, but expands the number of addresses so greatly that even if millions of these devices are used worldwide, each and every one will be able to have it's own personal IPv6 numeric address.

For those of you who know me, and hopefully a few others that may remember my open source project Xanjax, it turns out that it develops new applicability in the light of these tiny lightweight server devices. With very little adaptation, the Xanjax micro AJAX framework, which is still less than 10 kilobytes in size, can become an effective framework for such devices, wrapping remote control and monitoring functions. Xanjax now supports server push and XHTML via asynchronous contextual JSON objects among other things, and it's now compatible with pretty well all browsers. Not much has been done with Xanjax in the last year (AWOL in Peru again) but it's about two years since I talked about it last on ClubLinux so quite a bit was done since then. Please give the project a much needed moral boost by visiting the site. You may even find it useful! Anyone willing and able to contribute would be the best bonus :-)