Victor Churchill wrote:
> 2008/8/31 Damian Brasher <lug@???>
>>
>> He he:) The price may have dropped or the spec. upgraded by then. I'm
>> downloading Linpus lite live CD to try with a VIA EPIA 800 MHz Mini ITX
>> and a 500MHz VIA CPU and will compare the performance, look and feel
> Hmmm... I'd certainly follow that with interest. I have an old Vaio
> PCG-C1XN sat in a drawer 'cos I failed to get Debian or Ubuntu onto
> it, and this might just suit nicely.
It turned out to be an interesting weekend, I at least consolidated all my
low power PC's. I used the BBC iPlayer as a benchmark tool.
Linpus was a very slow download but worked straight out of the box on a
VIA EPIA SP 8000MHz. Very fast boot, worked with *no* configuration at all
and the default desktop was highly mobile device orientated, very fluffy
and really really easy to use; literally anyone will be able to make it
work. BBC iPlayer and sound were very acceptable. I got bored of the easy
to use GUI and simply switched over to the other desktop, default Xfce
layout. Nice set of applications too.
I needed to swap the VIA EPIA 800 MHz MB with my wife's EPIA 500 MHz MB
which was not handling XP Pro (work connected) very well. Browsing,
although reliable, had latency and iPlayer playback was jerky. I attempted
to load Linpus on this machine before I swapped but the boot-loader failed
even though I used several DVD/CD drives and disks, perhaps an intrinsic
IDE architecture issue.
VIA EPIA SP 800 MHz went into the XP Pro case without to much difficulty
apart from the VIA Vinyl drivers which will not feed sound out of the
green 'out' plug for some strange reason, the driver seems to have wired
up the surround sound badly. iPlayer now has very acceptable playback
quality.
I tried Puppy Linux 4 with the VIA EPIA 500 MHz which is now in my mini
ITX case with a new slim quite 80G 2.5 and slim DVD/CD RW. No fans are
required for this configuration and I keep the box in it's stand upright
so the vents face upwards. It's dead quiet. Puppy was great, very very
fast and I felt the OS was aware of itself and in control of the hardware.
iPlayer was not quite watchable but you would expect this on a VIA EPIA
500MHz board. Much improved browsing and application performance over XP
Pro.
I only need this box for email, documents, internet, Vim and most
importantly a console, my laptop and server do the rest. Which is where
Puppy let itself down for me. The console fonts are not anti-aliased and
there are few up-to-date development utilities (the requirements for the
box). Installing Vim turned out to be an unsuccessful ordeal. So I have
finally settled for a manually cut down CentOS compromise. i686 kernels
may not work with the EPIA 500 MHz, a few attempts to install Fedora i686
revealed this.
My ex-Mac Mini G4 has finally been refreshed with Mac OS X 10 and donated
to my Step Daughter as an early Xmas present after her ageing MacBook pro
finally gave up the ghost.
Looking forward to owning an Aspire One late December onwards:)
Damian
--
Damian L Brasher
http://www.diap.org.uk - Quick and low-cost way to make an environment
more robust by backing up data in multiple places.
