After running my home Asterisk setup on an old Dell desktop for the past year I decided to take the plunge in to an embedded system - a Soekris Net5501.
I settled on the 5501-60 which comes configured with the following:
- Small form factor enclosure
- 433 Mhz Geode processor
- 256 Mbyte RAM
- 4 Mbyte boot flash
- 4 ethernet ports
- 2 serial ports - one internal one external
- USB port
- CF socket
- 44 pin IDE connector
- SATA connector
- Mini PCI socket
- 3.3 Volt PCI connector
The first thing I did when it arrived was take the screws out of the case and take a look at the guts (Pics will follow in a future post). The footprint of the entire system is the size of a small 12 port switch.
After showing it off to some friends I quickly moved on to getting a combined Linux and Asterisk distro installed. I started with AstLinux.
Check back in a few days and I’ll provide a review ![]()



