[ale] Size does count.

[Benjie]

I've used 10 different shuttle brand mini-pc's ( AMD and Intel) over
the past 3 years, and I have had horrible results.  I have experienced
about %80 power supply failure, and I think they cut too many corners
on the motherboards in manufacturing.  They have been very flaky.  I
will say that I have yet to experience any problems loading Fedora,
RedHat, or Debian on them.  There choice of hardware has been pretty
mainstream, which is a plus.  I have to admit that my failure rates
may be high because these machines have traveled a lot.  They were all
set up as application servers for the sales team at my former
employer, and God only knows what happened to them on the road.  So
your experience may be better.  The heat pipe technology seems to work
okay for cpu cooling, and the more recent models have been pretty
quiet, but they are still audible in a quiet room.

The epia processors in my experience suffer from too much integration.
 I haven't been able to use a board with anything other than
integrated video, and it was awful under Gnome and Fedora.  But the
system was way quiet,  I could barely hear the hard drive.  Good luck
Vernard.

Benjie

On 6/12/06, Vernard Martin <vernard at venger.net> wrote:
> I'm thinking about upgrading my linux desktop. The current one is a 1Ghz
> Athlon with 1GB of ram and 20GB hard drive (I have my music collection
> on another machine).
>
> I've always been a fan of small, quiet computers so I'm thinking that
> this time I'll buy something new that fits both of those requirements.
> The problem is that I'm not nearly as up to speed as I used to be on
> ultra-small or ultra-quiet machines. So I'm hoping to draw upon the
> extremely diverse, eclectic and geeky nature of the ALE mailling list to
> help me out here.
>
> Any ideas? I've seen the Shuttle boxen but for the most part they are
> designed more for size than quiet. And I've seen the Antec cases but
> they are designed for quiet and not size. I'm greedy and I want both.
> And I'm willing to pay to get it. I've been looking at the Apple Minis
> but since I plan on running Linux, it seems like a waste of money since
> the hardware inside of it isn't supported as well under Linux as it is
> under MacOS (Damn you Steve Jobs. Damn you to hellllllllll!)
>
> So what other options are out there? Are the Epia based machines fast
> enough for desktop use? Anyone found anything that might tempt me?
>
> yours,
>
> Desperately Seeking Smallness (and Quietness)
>
> aka. V
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>