Just this weekend my ordered mini computer arrived after waiting two months. Basically, it is a single core ARMv7 processor with 800Mhz, 1GB RAM, 1000baseT Ethernet and a MicroSD instead of a harddisk (plus some other features). Its size is 55x55x42mm and weights 91g. The power consumtion is around 3W and less than 1W at standby. I am runing it unter Ubuntu.

First I was struggeling a while with the software because there are not so many packages avaible for ARM as I am used to have with a straight forward x86 computer. I wanted to give Mapnik a try but without success. I ended with PostgreSQL 8.4 + PostGIS and an old version of Mapserver 5.6.x - thanks to precompiled bins at launchpad. Luckily I had some older rendering rules for this mapserver version here (thanks to the mapserver-utils project). So some hours later I made it….loaded a 30MB *.osm.bz2 file (300MB database size) into PostgreSQL and got it rendered.

What I have learnt is that unlike my “normal” rendering computer, where IO is the bottleneck, here it is the slow single core CPU. Personally I am a bit surprised how good it works. Okay, slow but faster much faster than I have expected….somehow like an internet connection from the old days.