For the past couple of weeks, I've been playing around with Ruby on a 
Gumstix computer. This is a small machine  -- it fits in the palm of an 
adult hand -- with an ARM (Intel XScale variant) processor, 16 MB of 
flash disk and 64 MB of RAM. The basic component boards are, as the name 
implies, about the size of a stick of gum. There are two models, one 
which takes an MMC card and the other which takes a Compact Flash (CF) 
card. The operating system is Linux (2.6.18 at present). See

http://gumstix.com

for the hardware, cross-development toolchain and other software details.

I have enough of this working that I'm looking for testers and ideas for 
applications. The basic software distribution includes Ruby, although I 
had to tweak the Ruby makefile a bit. SQLite 3 already runs on the 
platform as well, as does lighttpd, so one obvious one is a Rails port. 
I have most of the pieces of the Rails port working -- the hardest part 
is getting all the paths and environment variables correct for both the 
cross-development toolchain and the target system. Because of speed and 
space issues, anything that involves a C compile step, such as 
sqlite3-ruby, needs to be cross-compiled and cross-linked on the host 
development system.

Right now, the pieces that are mostly working are on RubyForge at

http://rubyforge.org/viewvc/RailsOnAStick/?root=vgrails

You'll need a Linux host, Ruby 1.8.5 and Rake for this. As far as I know 
any Linux with Ruby 1.8.5 will work, although I only use Gentoo so there 
are probably a few things I take for granted that will need to be added 
to the project for other hosts. So ... what would you do with one of 
these? A robot that speaks Ruby? Hmmm ... how about a robot duck that 
types? A "massively parallel" map-reduce engine (non-floating point -- 
the hardware doesn't have a floating point unit)? A network monitoring 
device?

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.