[Gllug] Fit PC

[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 04:43:52PM +0000, Simon Wilcox wrote:
> The discussion of the BeagleBoard made me curious about other tiny 
> format systems that I could use to replace the quiet but not silent 
> little machine that I use for driving webcams at home.
> 
> Ideally it needs some storage and wifi. It should be silent and small.
> 
> CPC sent me a promo for the Fit PC today - http://www.fit-pc.co.uk/
> 
> It seems to fit the bill but I'm wondering if anyone has any experience 
> with it or would recommend something similar ?

This seems very similar to the Viglen MPC-L which I've been gradually
building [1].  I took the Viglen apart, and there's a photo of the
insides on the site linked below.  It consists of a single board about
maybe 5" x 5", and I suspect the same board is used in the PC shown on
your site above.

The AMD Geode is a funny old processor.  It is hard to describe, but
it's both sometimes unexpectedly slow and at other times quite fast.
>From what I gather, certain things including some PCI devices are
emulated by the processor, and it seems that if you tickle them in the
wrong way, you hit some slow software-emulated corner case.

Generally speaking, it's not too bad if you want an underpowered, but
cheap, super-low-power and _completely_ silent PC.  As a server, it's
great.  The only real drawback I found was that rsync is quite slow
(apparently because rsync does a lot of processor-intensive
md5summing).

Note that the Viglen was 79 pounds.  The one you show above is a lot
more expensive, but appears to have a very similar spec.

Rich.

[1] http://camltastic.blogspot.com/search/label/homeserver - It is
finished and working now, I just need to take a final photo and write
up a little bit about the various daemons running on it.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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