CherryPal Mini PC Makes Firefox the OS

If this thing had one more ethernet port, I'd buy them and start selling them to my clients as firewalls (assuming I can boot off an external hard drive in order to image the flash, or install a system). For less than $300 you can have something that's better than anything Linksys or SonicWALL (who my company generally sells to businesses) can come up with, with a web cache, gateway AV and content filter rolled into it. Is there anything like this with two ethernet ports?

USB ethernet card? (yes I know, not exactly ideal, but doable)

Yes, doable for me, but hard as heck to convince a client of...perhaps a non-profit, but not a for-profit company.

hehe. True.

Or one-NIC NAT? One Ethernet card, with a conventional external address and an aliased internal address. Yes, the best throughput is half what it could normally be, but on a budget, it works.

If you're doing firewalls and routers, just go for a Soekris ...

Hey, those are cheap...and right what I'm looking for! Cool, thanks.

wireless firewall/gateway for coffee shop or small business might work.

The storage is in the Amazon cloud ...

You should be able to image it with whatever you want, I suppose...assuming it boots with a PC or USB drive, which most things do now.

Just hope they didn't take the approach that OLPC did. Getting a seperate OS to boot on that lime green brick can be a real treat. If you ever try, give yourself a couple of days, one of which is getting the security key from them that will allow you to do it at all in the first place. After that, the real fun begins.

Quoting:The device runs a version of Debian Linux behind the scenes; however, the browser is really the application through which the user interfaces with the machine. Essentially, Firefox is the unit's operating system.

NO. Firefox is the unit's User Interface (and even that has to be running on something else...like an X server). The OS is still the OS. (yes, I know there could be an argument here as to what exactly defines the OS, but I personally still maintain the OS is the OS and the User Interface isn't)

That said, it does look like an interesting device. Though I wonder what they are actually referring to when they say iTunes is one of the preloaded applications...as last I checked iTunes didn't run on Linux... And I'm personally still not real keen on having all my data stored "out there" somewhere, but some people might find something like this ideal for their usage habits.

It does have OpenOffice, I think, so there's probably a terminal and a few other utilities on there.

However, if things were set up right, I wouldn't mind using a browser to control the configuration.