Dead Ink Vinyl

Everybody has been a buzz about the news that Apple is switching to Intel CPUs. After watching the keynote presentation for myself and reading Jason Kottke’s synopsis addressing earlier unanswered questions, I have firmly decided that this move is a Good Thing.

What distinguishes a PC from a Mac is more a matter of its BIOS and hardware component architecture than its CPU. Since the x86 Mac will remain a closed architecture under control by Apple, I do not expect to lose the Mac Experience in the transition.

As a computer user, I don’t care about the what’s inside the box, I just want it to work. I take for granted now the flawless sleep and wake cycles through which I put my laptop, but I still encounter Wintel laptop users who are amazed that I close my notebook with such confidence that everything will be as it was when I open it again. As a developer and power user, I still don’t care about what’s running under the hood, so long as it runs what I want fast and doesn’t “get in the way”. Finally, as a laptop user, I need all that reliability and power to run for 3-4 hours on a battery. I have no reason to believe that these needs will not continue to be met by Apple — no matter what CPU is crunching the numbers.

With my new, static IP addresses, I’ve started kicking around the possibility of running a public server. I don’t know for what exactly I’d run the server. Possibilties include running Subversion, an OpenLaszlo project gallery, an Echo2 project gallery, or a Confluence knowledgebase for the Echo community. Since I don’t need to run a server — I just want a server — I don’t want to spend a lot of money. In fact, I want to spend as little money as possible.

I donated all of my old computer equipment to a local school system last year, so a new server means new kit. Thinking of a Linux server, I looked up Dell‘s offerings, since I get an employee discount with them. It would be $420 + shipping for the lowest-end box they offer. That’s close enough to the price of a Mac mini (with my employee discount) that I seriously contemplated that angle. Still, the $400+ price range is more than I want to invest in this project at this time.

Then I recalled that the Linksys NSLU2 can be hacked to upgrade its Linux kernel and services. I want to keep my current NSLU2 as a file server for my home network, so I would need a new NSLU2 ($80) and a small, external USB2 hard drive ($80). That’s more in line with my price range. Looking over the NSLU2-Linux sites, it certainly runs Web servers serving static content just fine. But does it run Java?

The NSLU2 runs on an Intel IXP425 Xscale CPU. I was unaware of any Java runtimes for the processor until I came across Kaffe. This is not the first time I’ve heard of Kaffe, but it is the first time I’ve seriously considered it. This thread indicates that the newest versions (1.1.4) should build on NSLU2-Linux. Kaffe’s compatability reports indicate that it should be suitable for server-side applications. Intrigued, I dug further and found some hope that Tomcat will run on Kaffe with minimal tweaking.

So I’ll sleep on it a while and revisit the idea of setting up a Servlet server on an NSLU2 “soon”.