[Beds] Debian on EPIA Mini-ITX motherboard

[Neil Darlow]

Hi All,

I've recently constructed a desktop system built around a VIA EPIA Mini-ITX 
motherboard and thought members might be interested in hearing about it.

The VIA EPIA Mini-ITX motherboard is available in two models 1) a 533MHz 
fanless VIA Eden CPU and 2) an 800MHz VIA C3 CPU. I based my system on
the 533MHz Eden model.

The board itself measures 17cm by 17cm and has IDE, Audio, Video, LAN,
Serial, Mouse and USB functions built-in. There is no Floppy interface but the
BIOS is capable of booting from CD-ROM, USB-Zip and LAN so it's no great 
problem.

The board features a single PCI slot into which I put a Maxtor ATA/133 UDMA 
controller card. The purpose for doing this was that I had four IDE devices, 
which I wanted to operate in the fastest way possible, so I configured them as
Master on their own dedicated channels.

The IDE layout chosen was hda=Maxtor 40G ATA/100 drive, hdc=LG 8120B
CD-RW drive, hde=Maxtor 40G ATA/100 drive and hdg=HP Colorado Tape drive.
The two Maxtor drives are configured as a software RAID-1 Mirror which gives 
an additional boost on read operations and some resilience to drive failure.

I've been using Debian for a couple of years now so chose to install Debian 
testing/unstable on the machine. Initially I used a 2.4.19-k6 kernel image, 
planning to build a custom kernel once everything was up and running nicely.

The machine was soon up, on ext3 filesystems, with KDE-2.2.2 and favourite 
graphics and development applications installed. Now was the time to look at 
building that custom kernel.

On the basis that I would be putting some effort into building a custom kernel
(going though all those configuration options is no tea party) I decided that 
I would include the low-latency and preemptive kernel patches to increase the 
performance and while I was at it I would replace the standard sound drivers 
with ALSA. This was all achieved with a minimum of effort.

I was really pleased when XFree86-4.2.1 finally made it's way into Debian 
testing/unstable. This gave me two new features over the support for the EPIA
onboard Trident Cyberblade graphics 1) 24-bit colour support and 2) hardware 
acceleration support. Neither of these were possible with XFree86-4.1.x.

So what I have now is a nice quiet desktop system that performs remarkably 
well considering the mid-range speed of the 533MHz VIA Eden CPU. All of the 
hardware and kernel tweaks aimed at improving performance obviously play a 
significant part in this.

What's the downside? Limited expandability for one and, so far, I haven't 
figured-out a way of playing MIDI files within KDE-2.2.2 on this setup. The 
KDE Control Center actually segfaults when attempting to configure the MIDI 
settings. I suspect this is a limitation of the AC97 onboard sound support 
but all the KDE sounds work and alsaplayer happily plays MP3 and Ogg-Vorbis 
files.

If you're thinking about building a dedicated firewall or router, the VIA EPIA
Mini-ITX motherboard, in combination with Debian, is a good choice. I've been 
using and tweaking my machine for a couple of months now and it's proved 
extremely reliable. I look forward to a gcc-3.2.1 compiled KDE-3.x to improve 
it's performance even further.

Regards,
Neil Darlow M.Sc.
-- 
Open Standards/Free Software Consultants http://www.darlow.co.uk/
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