Recently in Old hardware Category

I've been thinking about building my own very small machine around the dual-core Intel Atom processor with Nvidia graphics. Yes, I know that Nvidia is freedom-hating and all, but I think that for the small form factors such as Mini-ITX, Intel and Nvidia are heading in the right direction when it comes to compactness, power consumption and graphical sophistication.

I usually begin my search with my favorite Mini-ITX vendor, Logic Supply, but I have also begun looking at pre-assembled systems that ship with Linux. Both ZaReason and System 76 are building small boxes around the Intel Atom/Nvidia platform, some single core, others dual core — and I do recommend the latter.

The one stopping point for me, other than money, is that I'm not sure whether or not these pre-built boxes have CPU fans or use passive cooling from massive heatsinks. For years now I've been leaning toward machines with no spinning fans either in the box itself (on the CPU or elsewhere) or the power supply. With Logic Supply I can easily make this happen.

At ZaReason, the Ion Breeze 4220, starting at $399 for single-core, offers a variety of options, including the above-mentioned dual-core Ion CPU. I don't know if Earl, the ultra-accommodating chief technology officer at ZaReason, is offering the option of a fanless motherboard — I'll ask him.

System 76 offers its Meerkat Ion NetTop with dual-core Ion starting at $359.

One thing that ZaReason offers in the Ion Breeze that I like is an optional external fanless power supply.

I've been running my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client as a standalone Linux/BSD box almost since the beginning of my foray into open-source operating systems, with only a single fan blowing across the Mini-ITX motherboard and its heat-pipe-cooled CPU. The fan doesn't work when the box is upright, so for all intents and purposes this is a fanless computer, and I've never had a problem with thermal issues — in fact, it runs quite cool, if not quickly with its VIA C3 Samuel processor (that's supposed to be a 1 GHz model but for some reason only runs at 500 MHz), maximum of 256 MB RAM and woeful sound and video chips.

Right now the Maxspeed is running Debian Lenny from an 8 GB CF card inserted in the thin client's built-in CF-to-IDE interface. Yep, no spinning hard drives either.

System 76 does offer solid-state drives on the Meerkat Ion, starting at $110 extra for a 40 GB Intel drive.

If the Intel Atom Ion processor isn't what you're looking for, both System 76 and ZaReason have plenty of other desktop, laptop and server machines to look at.

The best thing about buying a computer from a shop that ships with Linux (in the case of these two retailers, Ubuntu) is that your hardware is pretty much guaranteed to work. You'll have audio, video, suspend/resume, all that stuff that sometimes is hard to get straight on the box that shipped to you with Windows.

In the times I've spoken with ZaReason's Earl, and the company will build, test and ship pretty much anything you want. They specialize in Ubuntu, but you can ask for a box to be loaded with Debian or CentOS, and I believe they'll do it.

Do ZaReason and System 76 charge more than your standard computer seller? Probably. You can't get the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel deals that are offered on the cover of the Office Depot circular, but those machines often do have bits of hardware that you'll tear your virtual hair out to get working properly.

When you get a machine from a company that specializes in Linux, not only will everything work, but you'll get support that will help you clear up any issues.

And for many people — and I'm getting more like this myself with less time available for banging-my-head-against-the-wall tinkering — it's worth a little extra money for somebody else to have figured out all the issues, or in the case of these companies, to choose hardware components that work well with free, open-source operating systems from the start.

And even if you are a tinkerer, chances are it ZaReason or System 76 have built you a machine, it won't just work well in Ubuntu but will be a great platform for other Linux distros you might want to run.

Not wanting to leave out BSD, you can get a pre-built and -loaded PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) laptop as well as two workstations (prices unknown) from IXsystems, the company behind PC-BSD. They seem to specialize in selling servers running FreeBSD and ask that interested buyers request a quote to receive pricing info. They're also offering CD and DVD sets of FreeBSD 8.0 if you don't want to bother downloading the ISOs and burning your own discs.

Not to go off on a tangent or anything, I've been giving FreeBSD a lot more thought lately. I've run OpenBSD on the desktop as my primary system for about six months, and I'm considering FreeBSD instead for a future test for the following reasons:

• Easier upgrades and much longer cycle
• More focus on desktop users with hopefully better (and more meta-style) packages for things like GNOME
• Flash 9 and possibly Flash 10 support through the Linux compatibility layer
• Better performance
• I really don't need it for architectures other than Intel/AMD (although PowerPC and SPARC 64 are available; side note — on the various pages emanating from its platforms page, FreeBSD offers not only official manuals from the makers of the hardware in question but also links to other BSDs that run on the architecture. A very nice touch, I think)
• Community that actually cares about end users who aren't developers

I need to try some live images of recent FreeBSD/PC-BSD releases. (Is PC-BSD a live CD yet? I haven't kept up, but I did utilize the live environment of DesktopBSD back when I was testing it).

I never did the full review I promised of Dru Lavigne's excellent "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, but I find it to be an excellent reference for the FreeBSD and PC-BSD user. Dru is one of the best writers around in the Unix community, and even if you don't run BSD you can learn a lot about using Unix/Linux from this book. I got a whole lot about the shell, file permissions and other Unix sys-admin tasks, from "Basics," just as Michael Lucas' discussion of sudo in "Absolute OpenBSD" makes that now-way-out-of-date book extremely relevant and useful for anybody running any kind of Unix/Linux today who wants to make the most of sudo in their own environment (and especially on the server).

On the same tangentially arrived-at topic, Dru Lavigne's latest book, "Beginning PC-BSD: Frugal Unix for Power Users," is slated to be released three days from now. If past work is any indication, this will be an excellent book for anybody contemplating the use of PC-BSD.

I'd rather Dru write a book on using FreeBSD on the desktop — not necessarily PC-BSD but building out a FreeBSD-based desktop through ports or packages — but I can understand her focusing on PC-BSD given that the iXSystems-led project is a lot closer to what Linux users are used to.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

The highlight of the Daily News moving from its huge, windowless box to a smaller office has been all the old equipment that has been flying out the doors.

Aside from the Power Macintosh G4/466 (not a 450, as I initially thought), I plucked a couple of trashed-looking old laptops from the junk heap.

Neither had batteries or power supplies. Luckily, the power brick for my Gateway worked in one, a Compaq Armada 1125.

The damn thing actually booted ... to a Windows 95 desktop.

It doesn't look like a great candidate for Linux or BSD, unless you're taking pure command line or the barest X desktop possible.

The specs:

Pentium 100 MHz processor
24 MB RAM (the machine's maximum)
640x480, 16-bit color display
3.5-inch floppy drive
1.2 GB hard drive
PCMCIA telephone modem card
Windows 95

What's missing? Enough memory to do much of anything with, a CD drive, easy networking (although I might have an Ethernet card that works).

So what should I do with this thing? Clean it up a bit and see what the intelligent masses on eBay give me for it? Hey, the damn thing boots, which is more than I could say for a lot of gear I come across.

Note: The photo above isn't this exact Compaq Armada 1125, just a representative image plucked from the Web.

Update: Since all I've got is a floppy drive, I pulled my Linux-on-floppy discs and loaded up the two-floppy Basic Linux.

The Compaq booted, and after the second floppy loaded, I was even able to use X.

Among the applications I used during my test were vi, another text editor called wp (with pico keybindings) and the Links text-only browser, all in an xterm window.

I don't yet have networking up, but I'm working on it.

More Basic Linux:

There was a time when I was fascinated with the idea of using thin clients as actual computers.

My "first" Linux box, which spawned dozens of distro reviews and many hundreds of blog posts was a Maxspeed Maxterm thn client that worked so well as a stand-alone PC because it was basically a mini-ITX motherboard and small power supply crammed into a thin box.

I daisy-chained a few IDE data and power cables through a hole in the back of the thin client so I could hook up a CD-ROM and hard drive outside the small box. Adding a keyboard, mouse, monitor and 256MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I was ready to go.

At that point, the Maxspeed functioned pretty much like any other computer. Anything that could run on a VIA C3 Samuel processor could run on the box. That wasn't everything, mind you, but it was enough to get by.

I'm thinking about buying a new test box -- something cheap (I never want to spend more than $50 on any computer), probably in the Pentium III range, maybe a Pentium 4 if I get a deal.

That and the fact that the Daily News is moving a few blocks down the road to a new office, which has me throwing away massive amounts of paper and inventorying all the tech garbage I've accumulated over the past couple of years.

In one of my file drawers, I found an HP/Compaq t5300 533MHz 32/64 thin client that I got for about $10 on eBay.

I wanted to see if I could run Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux on it, but once I got the thin client in the mail (hey, for $10 I didn't do a whole lot of research on it), I pulled it open and saw that replacing the flash memory with something programmable would be difficult. It wasn't made of off-the-shelf-parts like the Maxspeed.

But it did work. The 32MB RAM, 64MB flash, 533MHz box, with keyboard, mouse and monitor connected, booted to what looks like a Windows CE desktop. Included is a CE version of Internet Explorer (something from the IE4 era, I think), and enough utilities to enable me to set a static IP and get networking into the box.

Not every Web site looks pretty in a cutdown IE4, but surprisingly the thing can (almost but not quite) post an entry to Movable Type 4.1 with relative ease, even if it crashed repeatedly crashing the browser when I saved the entry.

At least it saved. And since the browser starts in about 2 seconds on this little, fanless and completely silent HP box, there are worse things than crashing the browser. I eventually crashed the entire thin client, but it does recover remarkably quickly.

I'd still like to get a thin client working with Linux, not as a quasi-PC with full hard drives but with nothing but solid-state memory. Once I finally get a new text box (I'm thinking something generically Dell or HP), I'll use the Maxspeed in the way it was intended — almost. It's flash memory is a CF card (and no, it didn't come with the original), and I plan to install Puppy Linux on that CF card and run it as a silent workstation, perhaps saving my files on a USB flash drive (or on the CF itself).

Let me just say that in the days before I got my hands on two nearly free laptops, I had a lot of fun with thin clients.

The HP has built-in terminal software in addition to RDP and Citrix capability (I hardly know what either of those means), so I could use it as a non-X terminal (not terribly exciting) or try to sell it for what I can get on eBay (likely).

As for my new test box, I've seen quite a few promising candidates in the Pentium III and 4 range. I'd like something that can run 1 GB of RAM, but I will take 512 MB if necessary. I did see one with 1.5 GB capability. I have a pretty good feeling that a nearly 2 GHz CPU with 1 GB of RAM will run things very, very well when it comes to Linux and the BSDs.

I've seen some nice things for $60, but I'd rather part with $25, or get something for free. The latter has happened before, and it could happen again.

What I'm saying, basically is that if you're running anywhere near 64MB of RAM and you, say, want to run Firefox, you need more memory.

The $15 Laptop -- a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX CPU -- ran a Linux console with no problem and even did an X session, provided no "heavy" apps like Firefox were used.

But how can you get along with just Dillo as a Web browser?

It's not easy if you want to do any kind of blogging, which a) uses the more-memory-intense Firefox and b) demands much more out of Firefox and the whole system as well.

Well, I can safely say that a 233 MHz CPU and 144MB of RAM are enough to run Puppy Linux (currently version 2.13, for which I continue to have a soft spot), Damn Small Linux 4.3 and even OpenBSD 4.2.

I'm going to reboot into OpenBSD right now to see just how well the Compaq is doing with it.

(I'm now back with OpenBSD 4.2)

Things appear to work pretty well with OpenBSD as well. Though certainly more secure than almost every other operating system out there (though I miss Debian and now also Ubuntu's ability to encrypt an entire drive with LVM) and as stable as anything out there, OpenBSD is in no way faster than the fastest Linux distributions.

And speed is a bit of a problem on hardware this old.

I'd have to try Debian again. Puppy and DSL are quite a bit quicker when it comes to screen refresh time in Firefox (and generally in X). I don't remember Debian Etch as being all that sprightly in comparison.

(Changing to DSL 4.3)

There's no doubt that DSL runs the graphics in X faster than OpenBSD. The screen does a much better job of keeping up with my keystrokes in Movable Type, and if the main purpose of this laptop is to crank out blog entries, that is an important consideration.

Of course, before I pull OpenBSD off of this drive, I'll have to make sure I have the xorg.conf saved, as well as a number of other configuration files as well as the output of pkg_info so I can remember all the software I have in this install.

I should probably just get a few swappable hard drives for the Compaq. Maybe even something bigger than 3GB. Just a thought.

Other problems with using DSL as the sole distro: no Flash (but OpenBSD doesn't have it either).

... (two weeks later)

I've been running the $15 Laptop a bit more. Having a good wireless connection helps immensely. I've been most happy with Puppy 2.13 thus far, since it has Seamonkey — a very acceptable Mozilla-based browser — and all the graphics work as they should.

I still have OpenBSD 4.2 on the hard drive, and as I say above, I'm reluctant to remove it, even though I can and will save the various configuration files in case I want to do a reinstall.

I'd like to try Wolvix again, just to see if the additional memory makes any difference in loading it. I could — and probably should — try Debian again. I don't know if it'll be as fast as Puppy or DSL, but it is worth trying.

What I'll probably end up with: I might leave OpenBSD on the laptop for awhile, but I can see myself ending up with a hard drive or Compact Flash chip with IDE converter completely devoted to storage and either running Puppy Linux off of the Live CD or as a frugal install on the hard drive or CF card.