Experimenting with SheevaPlug: prologue

Recently I've received my brand new SheevaPlug Development Kit. What is this exactly? Basically, it's a plug computer that runs on a low-power ARM (I think) CPU, has 512MB RAM, 512 flash, USB 2.0 and GigaBit. It only lacks a video/sound out (hopefully just to trigger creativity from all of us ;).

It has already a kickass community doing a lot of experimenting with it: media servers, backup servers, or even home automation stuff. I fell in love with it - its potential -, and its price ($99 + dementia-rated customs overheads in Portugal. tip: around the same amount of extra taxes. ouch).

I have read a lot about what can (not) be done with a plug computer, and I'm eager to start working with it. But first things first. The development environment has been created mostly for linux. And I'm running OS X. Thus I've downloaded VirtualBox and I'm currently in the process of installing Ubuntu on it, just to have a proper development environment kicking.

The next post about SheevaPlug will talk about the installation process of the development kit and getting something visible to boot.