[Beds] Debian on EPIA Mini-ITX motherboard

[Gibbsie]

I have had two VIA EPIA-800's running continuously since May this year when
I purchased them.  I have them running RedHat 7.3 (was originally 7.2), and
they are a real treat and I'm perfectly pleased with the two I have.

>From a Linux point of view, the boards are well supported since most things
are up and running from a fresh install, although dedicated VIA drivers are
available from www.viaarena.com.  I personally haven't played with sound
under KDE, so am not sure about the MIDI whether it works or not, but
suspect its a limitation of the sound chipset as mentioned by Neil.

If anyone wants a low-cost and small footprint platform, these are ideal and
definitely worth while investigating.  Best place to buy the boards (and
cases) currently seems to be www.ultim8pc.co.uk although www.ebuyer.com do
sometimes dip below ultim8pc's price.

I have a few articles on my website at www.gibbsie.org relating to the
mini-itx form factor - if anyone wants to add more to it, they are most
certainly welcome to (or if you find something not quite technically
correct, please point it out).

For a dedicated router function, I found that the "LEX Light"
(http://www.lex.com.tw/) is more applicable since the mainboard has a
Compact FLASH slot on the board (and is bootable), based around the
EPIA-533, has three NICs on board (Gigabit is an option), and runs off 12v
input - no need for FlexATX PSU.  I've not personally tried one of these
systems, but sound perfect.  Seems in the UK, they are only available from
www.ultim8pc.co.uk.

Anyhow, just some related information for those that are interested.

gibbsie

----- Original Message -----
From: "Neil Darlow" <neil@darlow.co.uk>
To: "Beds LUG Members" <beds@mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 1:18 PM
Subject: [Beds] Debian on EPIA Mini-ITX motherboard


> 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/
> ICQ: 135505456  E-Mail, Jabber, MSNM: see following GnuPG identity
> 1024D/531F9048 1999-09-11 Neil Darlow <neil@darlow.co.uk>
> GnuPG fingerprint = 359D B8FF 6273 6C32 BEAA  43F9 E579 E24A 531F 9048
>
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