Well, I couldn’t resist. I went ahead and bought one of the aforementioned Linksys NSLU2 boxes (colloquially referred to as a slug) and began tinkering. It’s a fun little box, and along with the help of guys on the irc channel #nslu2-linux I’ve got it running with a 20gb drive attached. In fact, I even moved one of my web pages over to it to show how it can serve files (yes, I know, many of the links there will be broken, it was a proof of concept thing).

The machine has a 266mhz Intel XScale processor, which is a variant of the ARM chip. Many similar speed chips are used in middle of the road PDAs right now, and using such a chip to run gcc is kind of hilarious. It takes quite a while for things to compile, but nevertheless I’ve managed to get vim, tcsh and a couple of other fairly hefty programs to compile and run. I’ll go on about why I think this is cool in an upcoming podcast.