On Sun, 05 Dec 2004 09:57:49 MST, "Jesse Off" wrote:
> Thank you for the description.  Based on that, the TS-7200 could probably
> easily be classified as a complete system; though a very modular one.  It
> does have a small enclosure and power-supply board of its own though it is
> often just sold as the board (a lot of customers build their own
> enclosures/power supplies).  It also has PC/104 (ISA) slots to add
> peripherals including video.  We do ship and sell a PC/104 VGA video board
> with PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors though this doesn't quite work
> with the TS-7200 netbsd port yet however since the VGA board has a x86
> BIOS extension thats required to properly initialize them.  We are
> currently building a LCD/VGA daughter card with touch screen controller
> that we will be supporting on the ARM boards.  I *have* to make this card
> work with Linux on the ARM since thats currently what all our customers
> are using, but I'd like to also make it work with NetBSD.  For this card,
> a USB keyboard would be assumed.
> 
> The "disk" for this board is the compact flash socket.  Compact flash
> cards look just like an IDE device and I have seen some up to 4GB large. 
> You really need at least a 256MB one for NetBSD, and if you want, there
> are CF to 40pin IDE adapters available if you want to attach a real hard
> drive (though you're only gonna get the PIO speeds)  You can buy the cards
> with boards/enclosures from us and we can currently preload a Linux OS on
> them, though its usually more economical to purchase from somebody like
> CostCo, where a 512MB card is currently going for around $46.
> 
> I have some pictures up of the board w/enclosure at
> http://www.embeddedARM.com/~joff/
> 

I don't wish to appear to be denigrating your product (indeed, it looks 
like a pretty neat box), but I'm not sure this sort of device can really 
be classed as a full-fledged machine in the way that something like the 
Iyonix is.

That's not meant to imply it can't run NetBSD: it clearly can.  But the 
number of applications that would be viable on it is, I suspect, somewhat 
limited.  The limit on physical RAM is one part of this.

There are a number of boards very similar in specifications to this on the 
market: I'm not sure we'd want to create full ports for all of them, which 
leaves us with a conundrum to solve.  I wonder if we should have a 
'sbcarm' port (single-board-computer) in which this is the first sub-port.

If I were restructuring the ARM ports again, I might well put the shark 
port into the sbcarm category.  However, machines have to be judged 
against their peers at the time they become available, and that changes 
with time.

R.