Sivasankar Chander wrote:
Buy a simputer.
A Simputer is not an embedded Linux board, it's an end-product.
And it's not competitive on price-performance.
I would like to know of any boards available
(economical) at Richie street or in Chennai (in
general) that I can use for building an embedded linux
system. It can be with any processor (ARM/MIPS/...).
Does anyone have any Embedded Linux distros
(Bluecat/RTLinux/FlightLinux/...)?
Embedded Linux distros are really not distros in the linux
sense; they're more like cross-toolkits that install on a
standard x86 Linux box and help to build binaries for the
embedded target. The distros don't actually run on the embedded
target itself. You can download some toolkits; some were on
the LFY CD; and you can build most of the stuff from scratch
yourself - this is what I recommend, although it's the most
time-consuming alternative.
The host is an x86 machine. The target can be x86 or
non-x86 (doesn't really matter).
Your best bet is to use AT-type PI/PII/Celeron/Via boards,
which you can get from most hardware maintenance shops for
Rs.1k or less. Almost any other alternative (especially
non-x86 development boards) is hugely expensive and
significantly lower in performance, e.g. a MIPS Malta
development board retails for $10k and runs at about 50 BogoMIPS.
(For comparison, a Via C3/733 + board sells for <$40 retail
and does ~1400 BogoMIPS).