[sclug] small, quiet things

[Matt]

* Simon Heywood <simon at triv.org.uk> [2004-04-04 21:26:39]:
> 
> I'm tempted by the Hush one, what with it looking so nice 'n' all. But,
> like seemingly all these small boxes, will involve a VIA EPIA
> motherboard, which *appears* to require a stupidly recent version of
> XFree86 for some video features, although it looks like the other bits
> and pieces should be okay.
> 
> Someone's done a HOWTO [2] for these boards; someone's also done a page
> detailing someone's experiences with Gentoo on a Hush box [3]. There's a
> Debian installation guide for an EPIA system [4] but it's pretty low on
> detail.
> 
> Has anyone here encountered one of these boards?

I built one of these about a year ago for my sister consisting of one of
the EPIA C3 800MHz boards, 256MB, a 40GB disk and a CDRW/DVD combo drive
all wedged into a shiny cube case.

The graphics chip is basically a Trident Cyberblade sharing system RAM,
and I built the VIA-provided XFree86 driver to give the option of TV out
should my sister ever want it.

It's run Slackware and Gentoo to date, and it will probably see Fedora
at some point too. The rest of the hardware works fine, all VIA bits &
bobs; viarhine ethernet, lm_sensors, and ALSA sound etc. even the
cpufreq stuff in 2.6.x should work with the longhaul CPU powersaving
function, although 2.6.x lacked the tridentfb support and lm_sensors
last time I tried it, so I didn't really investigate much.

The only problem with these older boards is the "is it a i686 or not"
CPU, which means you need to use a distro that doesn't turn on i686
instructions.

The later (Nehemiah?) CPU's used on the various 'M' boards have the
all-important CMOV instruction so I think i686 instructions are okay to
use. I think the graphics chip is also different, but apart from that,
most of the hardware should be the same.

Depends on what you want to use the box for I guess?

HTH

Matt
-- 
"Accept anything. Then explain it your way."
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