/. posted a note about Walmart selling
a $200 Linux PC a bit ago, and somewhere in there mentioned it used a mini-itx mainboard with a Via C7 CPU. I was in the market for a low wattage, small form factor mainboard for my internal Subversion repository, as my older fanless mini-itx board was doing some funky things.
Well, low and behold, /. strikes again - an on-line vendor started
selling the mainboard/cpu with the gOS Linux distribution for $60USD and free shipping. Dang, that was cheap for a mini-itx board! I rushed out my credit card and purchased one, thinking I was going to beat the rush. A 533mhz version still goes for ~100, so I thought I was getting a heck of a deal.
Got home the next week, opened the box, and found I had a micro-atx board... not mini (190 x 228 mm vs 170 x 170mm). Well crap... Not what I was after... For $60, there are better cpu/board combos. I should have done a bit more homework before pulling the trigger. I got what I deserve, I guess - making a purchase on 'information' gleaned from anonymous cowards and the like. One look at the pictures (not visible at the time, as I was surfing on my phone) clearly shows it was micro-atx.
So first thing I do is drop it in a case, plug in a CD, RAM, and a HDD and see what happens. The first challenge was the power supply - the mainboard needs not only the 20-pin ATX connector, but also the 4-pin 12v connector (why?). Had one in my box-o-parts, which was in there for being way too loud for a 400w power supply. Hooked it up, booted with the gOS CD, and had nothing but error messages.
Thinking it was the distribution, I pulled out another Linux DVD (Centos 5), and got more strange error messages. Strange, the disk worked the other day... Downloaded and burned another distro (Gentoo)... It failed in the same way. Than it hits me - this is the same DVD drive I had in my original SVN box - it was the problem! Boot to the head - I replaced the wrong part!
Back to my box-o-parts, I plugged in a trouble free 2x CD player from the Mesozoic era. Booted right (disk access, disk access, disk access) up without issues. 1600x1200 monitor picked up by default!
I get a quick Ubuntu splash screen, followed by the gOS operating system loading up. The 'development kit' is nothing more than a live CD with a handful of applications. Interesting. There was an install option, but I've got other plans for that box. I could see how this could work for someone who wanted to surf, email, watch youtube, play some music, and do some instant messaging. I'm thinking it will be fine fanless if I swap out the heat sink with one of my nicer leftover heat sinks. The two SATA and extra PCI port are a welcome addition.
Now that I knew the CDRW-DVD drive is what failed, I went back to the carcass of my fanless 533mhz C3 mini-itx server. This generates the second 'things that make you go hmmn' moment. The gOS cd booted just fine. Grabbed my Gentoo disk, and the machine would reboot as soon as it started loading up the OS. Same for Centos 4.4. Same for Centos 5. Same for Oracle Enterprise 4. WTF? Ubuntu 7.10 (same base as gOS) booted up just fine.
As far as I can guess, it looks like the newer distributions assume i686 architecture, where the C3 processor is i586. Still, I was shocked Gentoo's live CD had problems. That box ran years with Gentoo. I'll have to pick up a new CF card for the HDD and start the build process again this holiday weekend the old fashion way...
