some weeks ago i stumbled over the sheevaplug – about the first sample of the newly emerging species of “plug computers”, complete computers in a housing of about the size of a power adaptor. it’s said to become the next big thing, one or more of these hanging on every household’s DSL could take cloud computing to the next level – as they should become really cheap (<50€) with more commercial products being produced based on it.

currently the easiest to get is the development kit from marvell, and that’s what is happily blinking on my desk since a week now. Inside is an ARMv5 processor running at 1.2GHz with 512MB of RAM and 512MB of flash memory, talking to the outside via gigabit ethernet, expandable via an SDcard-slot and USB. it’s coming with ubuntu 9.04 preinstalled, and about everything one can do with that on a desktop or server can be done with this plug.

currently it’s running a webserver for local testing and file-exchange – and is serving my music via the great squeezebox server (formerly known as slimserver). let’s see what else it will get to do in the future, likely i’ll hook up a big harddisk soon to make it a full-fledged fileserver..