[lug] serial terminal ?

[Nate Duehr]

rm at fabula.de wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 02:02:33PM -0400, Ken Nagorski wrote:
> 
>>Hi there,
>>
>>Why not a 486 or something like that. 
>>
> 
> Ah, how profane! Terms are really quiet, no moving parts, just what you 
> need sitting on a balcony in a mellow summer night ;-)
> But serious: now disk, now fans, low power consumption and a high
> level of control over the serial settings  (which sometimes _are_ neccessary
> if you need to connect to strange hardware).
> 
>  Ralf


Been playing with a VIA C3 processor machine in the micro-ITX 
motherboard format (yes, ITX) -- processor is 800 MHz, case is only just 
over 2" tall, motherboard with processor and on-board sound, 2D/3D 
video, S-Video and RCA video Outputs, USB, VIA-Rhine 10/100 Ethernet, 
and all the other usual stuff you see on the ATX backplanes, uses 
standard SDRAM and IDE drives, and costs less than $200 shipped to your 
door sans RAM and hard disk.

Great little linux box to play with so far.  Also appears to run Win2K 
decently enough to play DVD's also...

And very very quiet too.  Processor draws 2.2W vs the typical Athlon 
pulling 70W.  Quite a difference in cooling requirements.

A friend and I were having fun hacking RedHat down to a size small 
enough to put on a 256MB Compact Flash card via a CF to IDE adapter and 
still have some room left over to do interesting things with it.  The 
only moving parts in that configuration would be a tiny little fan on 
the processor (you can get a heatsink and dump that fan) and the very 
small case fan on the case we were using, which could be disabled 
without a hard drive in the case.

Haven't done any benchmarking for speed, it probably sucks, but we were 
doing this because one of the very small cases available accepts 12VDC 
for a power input.  (Can you say, mobile computing?  GRIN.)

Nate, nate at natetech.com