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by TruthWillHurt 895 days ago
No one remembers the GuruPlug, or better yet - the GuruPlug Server Plus, When RPi 1 just came out this little gadget ran x86 Linux (!) and had hdmi out that could handle 1080p video, a feat that only RPi 4 can repeat.
5 comments

the Sheevaplug, Guruplug, and Dreamplug are what really got me into embedded computing and linux. I still have my Sheevaplug in storage, and a Dreamplug in service as my internal DNS server. the Marvell Kirkwood SoCs they were based on were quite long lived, eventually being rebranded as lower-end Armada chipsets.

P.S. if anyone wants to tinker with that ecosystem, there's still quite a number of people dedicated to packaging up Debian for them, and if you're okay with some soldering to get UART access, you can get a brand new $18 Dell Kace M300 to try out. in a lot of ways, I still prefer them to any newer single-board computers, despite my pretty significant collection at this point.

I was curious and searched it. Seems not everybody was that impressed: https://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2010/05/guruplug-server-plus-d... [2010]
Thank you, I was thinking about it yesterday, but I couldn't remember the name of it!
I have a collection quite similar (in size and content) to the author, but I must have started a bit earlier as I have a bit more of the first RPIs and also a Dream plug (which is another successor to the sheeva plug, like the guru plug)
I think you may have mixed up some memories. GuruPlug family is ARM-based.
Right, it was ARMv5 too which meant toolchain support was somewhat lacking and it didn't support non-aligned memory access which meant some programs that were written with x86 assumptions tended to segfault randomly.
I wonder which one is the one GP had in mind, DM&P Vortex86-based ones or VIA thin clients?