My brother, always the great tech gift giver, gave me a Blackdog for christmas this year.
Blurry photo:
Size comparison next to a drink:
The thing runs Debian PPC (their own apt repos and packages, since they had to do fairly significant modifications of the base packages). The stats on the device are pretty shnazzy (beware, too lazy to type it out, so just pasting output of relevant commands):
sh-3.00# uname -a
Linux blackdog 2.6.10-blackdog.1 #2 Tue Oct 4 11:02:07 MDT 2005 ppc GNU/Linux
sh-3.00# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
cpu : Virtex-II Pro
clock : 384MHz
revision : 8.160 (pvr 2001 08a0)
bogomips : 379.90
machine : Realm MPS
plb bus clock : 96MHz
sh-3.00# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 61 40 20 0 0 27
-/+ buffers/cache: 13 48
Swap: 0 0 0
sh-3.00# df -m
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs 508 114 395 23% /
The thing has *no* general IO ports, having only a USB connector, over which all power and communication with the device occurs, a finger print scanner for authentication stuff, and an MMC card slot for storage expansion (I can’t imagine the MMC slot is MMC 4, which would include the ability for general IO stuff). Setup on linux is not currently “automatic”, as linux tends to shun away from implicit ‘autorun’ and other things, but here’s the general rundown of how the device initially boots/spits things to your screen, etc. Some of the steps are skipped/differ depending on if the thing is plugged into a linux or a windows box, but for the most part the same process is used. I’ll be posting info on how to get the automatic stuff fully working in linux soon. Here’s the deal:
- Plug the device (hereby abbreviated “BD”) into a machine.
- The BD gets power over USB and *quickly* boots linux.
- Linux running on the BD uses the 2.6 kernel USB Gadget filesystem driver to make a SCSI CD-ROM/USB Storage type device show up on the USB port.
- If on windows, a small script copies the xming xorg server to the host, and runs it.
- Somehow (i’ve not looked at the details fully) the BD is poked to start “phase 2″ of the process.
- The BD shuts down the gadget FS stuff, and kicks off USB *networking* on the device. Windows/Linux detects a new USB network device, and runs DHCP which picks up the correct IP for the host endpoint.
- The BD spits up an auth window to the host via remote X. Same exact d*mn window weather running on windows (via Xming xorg server) or on linux (using normal X TCP stuff).
- You get prompted for your finger print:
- BD fires up the small ‘launcher’ app, which is a small utility for running X apps from the BD:
That’s it! It’s a very hackable device, they provide an SDK in the form of a device image and qemu-ppc for developing things for it. gtk+ is already on it, so one of my short term goals is to create packages for mono and gtk-sharp, and publish an apt repo for it. In the long run, it’d be a heck of a lot of fun to try to build a gentoo image for this sucker, if only for sh*ts and giggles. All in all, an awesome tech gift, and one my brother claims will help me ‘get the ladies’. Only time will tell.