I have been told that a simple system (say for emailing input text to
a single preset address) without linux (using a microcontroller chip
with raw code) would be much less costly to make (in terms of cost of
components ...not software) than a system which was powerful enough to
have linux running on it. Maybe by a factor of 5. However, it seems to
me that linux (in some distributions)  is small enough not to really
require a scalng of processor power and other components etc.
Would you agree that considerable scaling up (i terms of cost and
power of components)would be required just so that one can run linux?

---

Clarification of Question by myq-ga on 20 Jul 2004 12:23 PDT

there are two cases that I am interested in, I guess: 1) when a
(small) graphical LCD is being used and (2) when a (small) text based
lcd is being used.