
Smallest full-featured Linux PC ever? - kqr2
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS7216186184.html
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joshu
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.

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tome
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?

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joshu
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.

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hernan7
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.

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sant0sk1
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

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rs
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

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zacharypinter
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...

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jibiki
A low-energy hub for controlling household robots?

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david927
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.

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tome
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.

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

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Xichekolas
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.

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

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lecha
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>

