On Tuesday, July 22 , 2003, at 09:59 PM, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com writes:
Tarquin Mills wrote:
Does anybody know anything about Stowmarket based Linitx.com? A Linux company that does mini-ITX stuff.
Never heard of them, but I do know (now) their website doesn't work in Mozilla...
(It seemed to work OK for me though I didn't scratch very deeply.)
Site works fine when I ordered stuff from them and it is fine at the moment.
I've been wondering about a mini-ITX system for a while now - some particular things that would be important for us would be:
- plenty of disk space
- sound supported in Linux
- play DVDs, preferrably to a TV
- ability to connect some kind of backup device and use it from Linux (in particular I have travan tapes already)
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/hush.asp looked interesting but a bit of Googling for the chipset used left some doubt in my mind about sound support from Linux. (I suppose I could use a separate sound card until Linux catches up if that's really a problem, but I might want to use the PCI slot for something else - for instance to connect a backup device.)
Use the VIA sound module in the kernel (which is AC97 I believe) (OSS and ALSA works). Don't bother about playing DVDs on the machine. Your results will show it will turn out to be crap. If you want to watch DVDs, get a dvd player.
As for disk spaces. Make sure you get some hdd that contains an 8mb cache. And don't get western digital since people are reporting problems with them. Maxtor and ebuyer.com is your choice. You can at least put 2 hdds in the mini itx depending on which case you are going to get. My case is:
http://linitx.com/shop/product_info.php/cPath/8/products_id/125
It is a real nice case but from time to time it is noticeably _loud_. I took it to part a couple of months ago, clear the dust that got stuck in some places and it is probably quieter than before ;) (As far as my housemate reported.....)
Kernel? Here you go:
Linux castle 2.5.73-mm1 #1 Thu Jun 26 13:47:57 BST 2003 i686 VIA Ezra CentaurHauls GNU/Linux
And it has been up for a solid 26 days and it is running Gentoo Linux which is far better for the box since everything is compiled specifically for the VIA Ezra CPU. Using the 2.5 kernel gave the box further justice. Thanks to the anticipatory scheduling elevator. Noticeable differences are spotted in mplayer playing divx movies (when things slow down, 2.5 sorts this out where 2.4 just merely struggle).
I think that is enough information unless you want more ;)
C