Linux on Shuttle PCs

  • Thread starter Thread starter Layzee
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Layzee

Layzee

Hiya,

I'm looking to build a small linux box, I want something the size of perhaps a shuttle - or in that region, mainly because i would like to hide it out of the way somewhere.

I have enought spare parts for a reasonable pc, except case and motherboard. I have spare hard drives 2 ibm 30 gigs, and a seagate 60gig, about 384meg sdrams, a duron 650, SB1024 and an old voodoo banshee. Anyone got any recommendations for case, mobo that will run linux nicely (perferably redhat).

The shuttles look nice, I was thinking of going for something like the SS40G - i know i'd have to get new ram, but im not too bothered about that - I just want to make sure I'll be able to put linux on these machines.

Anyone got any ideas?

/Layzee
 
I'm fairly sure a friend of mine ran Linux (knowing him, RedHat) on one, he definitely had one and dislikes using Windows, so chances are it works, I'll ask him.
 
Try buying a Via Eden motherboard, Linux runs on them flawlessly. They are smaller than the Shuttles too and passively cooled. The URL is www.mini-itx.com IIRC. They are about £80 for the mobo, which has the CPU on, graphics etc. Its only a cyrix 533 but thats a pretty decent Linux box :)

Shak
 
I've got an EPIA 800 running Gentoo. My only comment is that they don't seem to be a full 686 processor as both a Gentoo install and FreeBSD userland compile broke when set at i686 but ran perfectly as a i586. The EPIA compiles stuff a lot better than I thought it would...it's no athlon-xp but it's not deafening me either (room seem colder as well :( )
 
It's acting as an NFS / Samba / webmin server so it's not too demanding to be honest. I did install fluxbox / X but never got round to configuring X and don't really need it now so I can't comment on GUI usage. When using it as a fileserver apparently the CPU load rarely goes above a few percent... It just sits there quietly humming :)

I've got my Gentoo distfiles on the server served by NFS to all the other machines so when any machine pulls back a source tarball it's kept for all of them on the server.

Eventually I hope to get a couple more. One as a qmail/courier/squirrelmail/apache server and another to replace my aging and somewhat knackered smoothwall box.
 
WOW!

Hi,

Thanks for the replies... I really like the look of the mini-itx boards. Some guys actually got it into a model car?? That platform would make an excellent linux box! Could have some fun designing a box too :-)
 
Originally posted by caveman
It's acting as an NFS / Samba / webmin server so it's not too demanding to be honest. I did install fluxbox / X but never got round to configuring X and don't really need it now so I can't comment on GUI usage. When using it as a fileserver apparently the CPU load rarely goes above a few percent... It just sits there quietly humming :)

I've got my Gentoo distfiles on the server served by NFS to all the other machines so when any machine pulls back a source tarball it's kept for all of them on the server.

Eventually I hope to get a couple more. One as a qmail/courier/squirrelmail/apache server and another to replace my aging and somewhat knackered smoothwall box.
Click to expand...

Would it be good for streaming mp3s?
 
Hi there, I'm planning on making a all in one server thing soon, (2x Epia 800's in a "Ice Cube"-esque box) with a 512mb of ram each, 4 gb laptop hd, and a 20gb one, DVD Drive on the 20gb one, the 4gb one is going to be the firewall, the 20gb one is going to be samba\ircd\mail\webmin server.. and maybe freevo, but I'm not sure cos I'm planning on putting bsd on it.. but still it'll all goto plan :)
 
My only concern with the Shuttle and the Asus equiv. is the power supply - my dad has one of the Asus Terminator's and it comes with a 150w power supply - has a cd, hd and a floppy attached. When attaching a 2nd hard drive it became unstable so thinking it would be power related I strapped on a 230w ps for a laff and she was happy as larry.

Problem is, as the power supply is tiny and a special shape, unless Asus make a more powerful version you cant easily have a safe permanent solution.

Just a thought...
 
yea, they are also rather hard to get hold of, but if you just have 1 hd on it and cd it'll be fine, I have no use for a fdd drive due to the wonder of bootable cds \o/
 
sis make no effort to produce linux drivers for thier gfx chipsets... there is an X driver for the sis315 chipset on the SS50 however dri doesnt work yet :/
 
The SiS630 hyas support, I installed it on a machine just the other day, a laptop :)

Look on the net and its easy enough :)

Shak
 
There is a new Via board coming out that follows the same idea as the previous Eden boards, except this one uses DDR, has much better onboard graphics (including MPEG2 decoder) and it will have cpu speeds up to 1Ghz this time. Its performance will be much better than the previous Edens and hopefully the fastest ones will be passively cooled this time.
 
Dose any one one if you can get a adapter plate for these boards to go into a normal mini atx case, the plate all the ports stick out off. I know it half defeats the object of a small machine but still could be failry quite but no problems with power supply and atx cases can be cheaper than the "propperones" Have been looking over the last few days about getting one fora server (smaba,webmin,squid) they seem from comments in this thread to be quite capable of this :)

Any further thoughts or comments on thes things for use as servers?

Thanks

Deano
 
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