Experiences Programming on Cyclades Term Servers?

Sunda666 writes "I just got my hands on the Cyclades TS800, which is a terminal server with 8 high-performance serial ports, and 1 fast ethernet port that happens to run MontaVista's Hard Hat Linux. This thing has a small RAM (16Mb) some SSD (8MB), and a PPC@48MHz processor. We plan to develop apps (mostly serial-to-eth gateway software, but anything goes) for it, and I'd like to have some feedback from the Slashdot crowd of sucess/failure histories, hints and stuff. So far I'm loving the little blue thing (embedded webserver, ssh, nfs, and RAS software - almost all open source!) - sweet." Sounds like a sharp little machine. How we do these things perform in production?

Good stuff

[itwerx]

I've never programmed Cyclades boxes but I've used them off and on over the years as terminal and print servers and I can say they're well nigh indestructible!
The company's been around forever and their product quality (and tech support) has always been excellent.
Their website [cyclades.com] always has useful stuff too.

Just got a couple

[Tobert42]

I just got a TS1000 and a TS2000 the other day. Great box - easy to set up and all that. I would guess that the thing to do is either get a PPC that can compile compatible binaries (possibly running Hard Hat), or set up a dev environment for cross compiling. Montavista likely sells a development environment for their OS, so that might be an easy way to get started. Personally, I would try to find a powerpc that is similar and copy the OS off the cyclades for development. That way, you could minimize the surprises.

Re:Just got a couple

[Sunda666]

In fact, MontaVista offers their "journeyman" edition for download. It seems to include all the cross compilers needed for the 8xx (ix86 host). Unfortunately all PPCs around are running MacOS ;-), and installing HH in them is a bit rough ;-)

Re:Just got a couple

[Phork]

since this device seems to run linux, there must be gcc that can compile for it, and uasauly(always?) gcc can be built as a cross compiler, so you can build on your x86 linux box(or even in cygwin) binaries for it. this is how a large amount of embedded devloping is done.