Smallest full-featured Linux PC ever? | Hacker News Reader

Smallest full-featured Linux PC ever?

linuxdevices.com

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I have the previous model. It really is very small.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshu/3308713850/

Unlike most esoteric kit, you can buy these on Amazon.

Nice! Can you tell me a little bit about your experiences with it?

I've been thinking of buying this for a while:

http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=43

but the Fit-PC2 has good enough specs to make it worth considering instead. It's also smaller!

Anyone know where I can buy this in the UK?

It's basically a Geode machine. I downloaded a recent ubuntu desktop distribution, booted it under VMWare and installed it to a disk. Popped the disk in the machine, it starts up.

Using Ubuntu's server variant was a bit more painful, as the kernel build assumes PAE or something; I needed to switch to a generic 32bit kernel. Not too bad.

The wifi driver that ships with Ubuntu didn't work very well with it, so I had to compile and install a new one. There was some oddness with the ifup scripts and I had to have it start up, shut down, and start up again to intialize properly.

I am largely happy with the device; it's just a small, slightly strange PC.

I am also using it with one of those $80 32gb Transcend SSDs. They are not blazing, but neither is the machine.

To answer my own question on UK distributer, it's available late April:

http://www.fit-pc.co.uk/meet-fit-pc-II.html

The thing that amazes me is that these tiny devices (the netbooks too) come standard with 1GB or 1/2 GB of RAM. 10 years ago or so that was a huge amount of RAM -- you could have a big Sun or AIX box running an industrial-grade Oracle instance on 1/4 GB RAM or so.

Full-featured is right. These things have an HDMI port with 1920x1080 resolution, an IR port, and an SSD makes them almost noiseless! Sounds like a great device for a media center PC. Load Boxee on there and call it all good. Very cool.

EDIT: Looks like the SSD option doesn't have pricing available, but it'll likely be > $500

True.. moreover with 160GB of drive space, it should hold all my music and videos :)

Infact, since it is networked nicely, it should be easy to control it from a wifi enabled handheld device

For a media center PC, just use a cheapo 8 gig SSD hard drive to boot from, and use a WiFi SAN to stream the movies off of.

Aside from a media center, any ideas what this class of devices could be used for at home (or as a portable device)? It seems like an awesome solution, but to what?

Augmenting laptop CPU (compilers, 3D apps, etc)? Mesh wifi? Better routers/firewalls? An alternative to VPC software (i.e., just remote desktop in and take it with you)?

I'm betting there's a cool startup that could be formed around a device like this...

A low-energy hub for controlling household robots?

But for $300? You can get something similar (although simpler) for less than $100: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6372429785.html

I'm planning to combine the latter with Boxee to create my home entertainment system.

You're looking at 200 MHz for that system, as opposed to 1 GHz for the basic Fit-PC2 and 1.6 GHz for the high range one.

And remember its the Atom that it's packed with. Feedback from EEE users have been that video playback is pretty decent

Reviews of Atom-based boards I have seen show that it doesn't do HD content well at all. 720p is hit and miss, and 1080p is just a no-go.

So it'd do DVDs and divx/xvid for you, but to play Blu-ray and mkv files you'll probably want to wait a bit and snag the new Nvidia ION platform, which pairs an onboard Geforce 9400 with an Atom CPU, and does full 1080p video with only 20% cpu utilization.

Also remember to divide Atom clocks by 3 when comparing to Core 2 (as a rough estimate, I choose Core 2 because most people are familiar with them). A single core 1.6GHz Atom might compare to a Core 2 at 500MHz using only one of its cores.

A DVI port! And no VGA. Nice. Have only seen VGA on these types of small units 'til now. Will check this out.

Wait a minute, didn't they install Linux on a potato? Potato is much smaller than this black box! Take a look at the pictures http://www.bbspot.com/News/2008/12/linux-on-a-potato.html

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