Assuming that they ever actually release this thing... what about the CherryPal?

5.8" x 4.2" x 1.3" in 10 oz.

2W

400 MHz Freescale, VGA, 10/100 Ethernet, Wifi, 256 RAM, 4GB Flash, 2x USB

Debian

$250

Probably not very good as a game server ... but attaching various USB things to it (card readers, WWAN dongles, etc.), and putting a battery on its power input, might make it a good storage/gateway type backpackable.

http://www.cherrypal.com/products/

Yes, I referred to it earlier. You can probably pick a different OS if you'd prefer. I doubt the 2W though, and I'm 100% sure you won't have 2W after you attached a HDD. A HDD uses approx 30W during spin up (hence staggered spin up is important sometimes), and approx 9W when idle. You'd have to opt for a flash based (SSD or not) PATA device, not sure if it'd require 40 or 44 pin though. For this purpose a 4 or 8 GB is probably enough. Those cost about 50-100 EUR here.

I wouldn't go with an HDD. I'd go with some sort of SSD/Flash based storage. There's DIY SDD adapters that let you put a CF card into a 1.8" drive slot, or 6 SD cards into a 1.8" drive slot. I'd go with one of those. Though, I'm not sure what's currently a good MB/s rate for that kind of thing (I want lower power than the HDD, but still at least HDD speeds, if not faster ... you know, the holy grail of SSDs ;-) ). But, you can get a CF card -> 1.8" drive adapter for $30ish, and a 32GB CF card for $100ish.

I've seen an adapter that says CF cards get up to 40MB/s, and I saw an SSD that does 36ish. Not sure what's normal for a laptop/iPod SSD though.

For the CherryPal though, you wouldn't use the 1.8" drive adapter, you'd just have a USB CF card reader. That should be a bit cheaper than $30. An ideal companion to something like the CherryPal would be a device that had an internal battery for powering itself and the CherryPal, so one connector to the cherrypal's power port ... and then also had a connector into the CherryPal's USB ports that provided 2 SDHC card slots, a CF card slot, and an ExpressCard slot.

Though, I also wish the CherryPal had a DVI (with DVI-A) interface instead of VGA. VGA is like having a PCMCIA card slot these days ;-)


As for OS ... Debian is MORE than acceptable for an in-backpack server. It doesn't need the pretty UI of Ubuntu or Maemo. I probably wouldn't even install X on it, if i didn't have to.

If you meet a DVI-only device you can use a converter. VGA <-> DVI converters exist.

I'm not sure if I/O is important for Texrat, or in general. If not, even a USB stick might be a possibility, but it might not be elegant having something 'stick out of the device'. Don't forget these have different speeds, too. Some good webshops provide the speeds in their inventory list.

SSD is said to be slow on many small files. There are also now faster SSD with SATA2 support. As you can see from the list hereunder SSD doesn't have to be very expensive.

http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/cat/674 (I have a PATA Transcend)

http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/cat/48 (tons of several options)

Debian is good, especially as default OS, but one might prefer a different OS.

EDIT: I would swear I saw embedded devices with DVI (e.g. on picco.nl), but x86 (VIA for sure (Jetway mainbords), and perhaps AMD Geode). Not any RISC-based platform.

I have yet to see a VGA -> DVI converter... (what your two way arrow implies). It's not cheap to do that because you need to do an A2D conversion.

But yes, the fact that DVI-A -> VGA converters exist is why I think every device that's going to have an external monitor jack should have a (micro|mini)?DVI jack with DVI-A support on it. It can be converted to VGA (DVI-A is the analog part of the DVI spec), and to HDMI (from the digital part of the DVI spec).

DVI with DVI-A is the "universal donor" of monitor connectors.

Hmm not sure we understand each other.

Device with VGA input (female)
Device with DVI output (female)

Then you need a DVI (male) to VGA (female) converter on the 2nd device, and use a normal VGA cable. You normally carry your VGA cable with you (or so I'd assume) having your converter with you in case you stumble upon a DVI only output.

If the second device has for some reason DVI male output you'd need a slightly different converter: DVI (female) to VGA (female)

Two gender changers and DVI -> VGA should work fine... No, I'm not being serious here, although no doubt there is some Chinese factory, somewhere, turning out DVI gender changers for no evident reason.

No reason VGA -> DVI-A wouldn't work, but from my limited experience/knowledge of displays, I think ones with both RGB and DVI interfaces generally have a VGA port and a DVI-D, rather than a single DVI-I.

(For reference, DVI-D is DVI with only digital signals, DVI-A is DVI with only analog, and DVI-I is Integrated, i.e. both, the universal donor you mentioned.)

Well, I'll give an example. I have a KVM with DVI. Its output is 2 DVI male. On my workstation it works (on DVI female), but I'll need a DVI male -> VGA female in order for it to work on my laptop. My graphics card came with VGA male -> DVI female which is exactly the other way around (it is what you'd need though). I haven't searched around yet on local stores, but I did see it on eBay.

Interesting discussion. I'm partway there, running Nokia's Mobile Web Server on my N95. Granted, I cannot develop and therefore don't have much more than a few web apps running on it; but its avariant of Apache and so I'm sure that if its there that its possible to do and modify for the IT's hardware.

I was actually just wondering about the feasibility of using an N95 as a pocketable server. Esp. if you could put Android (or some other linux variant) on it. Not sure. Or, if Android wont run on it, there's always putting Android on one of the kaiser family of phones, or something.