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Announcing B3

Posted: 17 Sep 2010, 03:39
by tor
FASTER, BETTER, EVEN MORE USER-FRIENDLY

I am very proud to announce our follow up to Bubba|TWO, Excito B3. Excito B3 is the next step after Bubba|TWO featuring the same key characteristics as its predecessor.

Main features of B3 is heavily beefed up hardware and improved software.

A 1.2GHz ARM CPU and 512MB of RAM gives B3 up to five times the performance of the Bubba|TWO. Even with this new CPU B3 still uses only 5-12W of power for its operations.

Excito B3 software is now based on the Debian Squeeze (version 6) distribution guaranteeing an up to date repository of prepackaged software and hopefully a long life cycle of the same.

For further information please check out our homepage.
Feedback and comments are welcome,

/Tor

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 17 Sep 2010, 06:37
by kurt2000
Hi

Can you be a bit more specifik about which arm cpu ?

is it 88F6281 ?

Wkr.

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 17 Sep 2010, 06:52
by willem2
Any plans to offer the B3 mobo for a "upgrade" price to existing Bubba|Two users :D

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 17 Sep 2010, 07:04
by tor
Hi kurt2000,

Yes its an Marvell 88F6281.

/Tor

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 17 Sep 2010, 10:21
by RandomUsername
Pretty impressive that you've managed to keep the power consumption down.

If you're allowed to say, apart from the different CPU/extra memory/one less eSATA port (what was the reason for that?) how different is the hardware in the B3 to the B2?

Thanks.

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 17 Sep 2010, 14:19
by kurt2000
Well, its not that impressive i think. It's nearly the same as the plugs with same chip.

What i like about the products, from what i can see, is the built quality off the chassis, integration off web frontend and config files.

It could be cool, if you added a frontend for a ipsec vpn or webdav configuration.

wkr.

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 18 Sep 2010, 03:38
by redw0001
I have some questions about B2, speaking as a Bubba2 user. More speed and more user friendly are always welcome, however I invested quite alot for my Bubba2 (1TB drive) last year and I feel it has alot of life left in it yet, so:

1: Can you quantify the speed improvement, does it help network transfer speeds? My main uses are as file server for my family and checking mail/file serving for us when we are away from home.

2: What are the improvements in user friendliness? (Sorry, answer might be partially in announcement doc but I'm a miserable failure at languages other than English)

3: For protection of investment, any chance of some form of upgrade for Bubba2 users? This would be a real clincher for me if I get positive answer to 1: above.

What I did get from the info was more performance --- roughly same power profile. Well done, big tick as far as I'm concerned

robin

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 19 Sep 2010, 04:56
by ubbe
willem2 wrote:Any plans to offer the B3 mobo for a "upgrade" price to existing Bubba|Two users :D

I DO hope so.

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 19 Sep 2010, 06:33
by tobbenet
I second that!

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 19 Sep 2010, 09:35
by DanielM
ubbe wrote:
willem2 wrote:Any plans to offer the B3 mobo for a "upgrade" price to existing Bubba|Two users :D

I DO hope so.
Come on guys, seriously? When Intel releases a new processor, do you get special prizes for having an old one? When Netgear releases a new router, do you get special prizes for having an old one? You can't expect a company to do things for free...

Maybe if you hurry up you can sell your B2's on eBay before "the world" has noticed there's a new Bubba?

/Daniel

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 20 Sep 2010, 14:37
by kfudd
Um unfortunately, the B2 is not an Intel processor... but sometimes I wish it was. At least then it would not be so difficult to upgrade to a version of Linux where you can install your own software.

I'm a little bummed that there will likely now be even less time devoted to the B1 and B2 to get a non-EOL version of Linux on them. Correct me if I am wrong, cause I am definitely not a Linux expert, but I just can't seem to get anything to install on the B2 without some kind of out-of-date dependency.

Well, you can give your old car in for a trade in on a new one, so I think your point is moot. Plus we bought the B2 for the software support, not only the hardware.

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 20 Sep 2010, 15:13
by trencarbe
I recall B2 has some performance difficulties, correct me if I'm wrong...
Will B3 be able to run Sun's Java?

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 21 Sep 2010, 13:10
by tor
Hi all,

Regarding power consumption, sure plug computers also run the same chip as we do. The main difference is that we pack it all together with a hard drive and still manages to get it to run at low temperatures.

Regarding performance, B3 is approximately 3-5 times faster in file transfers and disk operations than B2. Application performance, if you could use such a term, is also greatly improved. Horde should be a great deal snappier. The only drawback with the new CPU is that when we moved from PowerPC to ARM we no longer have an FPU. Thus applications that uses floating point operations a lot wont benefit as much as other apps.

Regarding UI-upgrades, the main thing here is the new photo album. It has gotten a complete rewrite which should increase usability and give an even more aesthetic look.

Regarding an HW upgrade plan. This is something that i can't comment at all on. I will certainly bring this up with sales but don't hold your breath on it.

Regarding Java, this really should work on B3. When moving the underlaying software platform to Debian Squeeze Openjdk comes pre packaged. That said this is nothing we have tested. If your taste goes to the .net stack it should be available as well with Mono (Packaged) No guarantees on functionality or performance on either of these though.

I hope this answers some of your questions,

/Tor

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 21 Sep 2010, 15:46
by ctoo
On B3, what approach to the inclusion of excito-specific changes on top of the Debian Squeeze packages did you take? The same approach as in B1 (where you replaced several Debian packages with your own versions), or by means of dpkg-divert as referenced elsewhere in the forum, or something else?

This is critical to the long-term maintenance of the product, I think: The approach chosen for B1 implied that there was too much work in keeping the product up-to-date with Debian, I believe. My guess is that this is the main reason why we're still stuck with a poorly working Lenny image for B1.

Re: Announcing B3

Posted: 21 Sep 2010, 16:08
by tor
Hi ctoo,

In both Bubba|TWO and in B3, and to some extent in the B1-lenny spin, we use a mix of repackaging and diverts. If possible to go with a divert fx if its only some configuration change we use this. It's however not possible in all cases to do this. Then we are only left with doing a custom packaging.

Regarding B1-lenny, most of the problems we have in that for now is actually side effects of none modified packages. Such as e.g. fetchmail which does not automatically start due to its default configuration.

/Tor