[plug] Mini-ITX Systems...

[Brad Campbell]

Trevor Phillips wrote:
>> 
> EverythingLinux actually have a quiet PSU - but it's a 300Wer... ^_^
> Went to the "JustCooler" website (who made it), but they had some wacky
> navigation that never showed up in Mozilla. ^_^

I have the Mini-ITX Spec here, were going to design our own PSU for them
as they have a MAX power requirement of 60W and we want a reliable 10-32v
power input.

> > >   - IDE Laptop HDDs
> >
> > Have not had a lot of luck with available 2.5->3.5 HD adaptors having
> > reliable sockets for the laptop drives.. Seem to be an intermittent source
> > of errors..
> 
> Really? How about a custom HD bracket for the laptop drive? If I do end up
> gutting a Sun IPX, there's not enough width for a CD-ROM AND a 3.5 HDD, so
> I'd have to look at customised brackets...

Yeah, they come with a hard mounting bracket. I have never used it. I guess that
would minimise the movement and thus help relieve the problem.
 
> > >   - IDE/Flash drives/adapters
> >
> > Just finished building my third prototype, with hot-swap.
> 
> Cool!
> 
> > Prototype 2 has been working on site for over 5 months now.
> > Slow to write to and read from these, but I uncompress the
> > filesystem from them on the fly into ram and run the entire
> > system out of ram. Works a treat. The config section of the
> 
> Great! Hmmm. I didn't think that they'd be slow, but now that you mention it,
> a friend's DigiCam is far from fast. It'd have to be faster than floppy,
> though. ^_^ How fast would it be compared to booting off CD (Knoppix style)?

Umm, I've not used Knoppix but I have used HPA's Rescue CD, and the flash
card is heaps quicker as the CD drive has a very slow seek. Flash seek is
instant, but transfer rate is not quick. Bonus is that you can get 512MB and
Gig sized cards if you take out a sizeable bank loan :p)

 
> > Currently have a basic system including networking, X 4.2, Wine
> > and application software all compressed into separate .tgz's
> > fitting into less than 14MB on CF card.
> 
> Wow! So a 64MB card would really be overkill. ^_^
> (Although probably not once you add Mozilla and Xine?)

I think you'd fit it all on there nicely.
 
> > Entire boot, from power button to fully functioning application
> > under X is 38 Seconds.
> 
> How fast would it be before X? ie; for a text only session?

Err.. Well because the entire system is in RAM, X takes about 1 second
to start up, so not much quicker really. (This is on a 1Ghz Celeron)


-- 
Brad....
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