Smallest full-featured Linux PC ever?

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.

david927• 17 years ago

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.

tome3• 17 years ago

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.

rs2• 17 years ago

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

sant0sk1• 17 years ago

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

stcredzero• 17 years ago

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.

rs2• 17 years ago

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

lecha• 17 years ago

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

torr• 17 years ago

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

hernan7• 17 years ago

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.

zacharypinter• 17 years ago

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...

jibiki• 17 years ago

A low-energy hub for controlling household robots?

Smallest full-featured Linux PC ever?

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