Linux on a Mini-itx
System
Updated 5/8/05
Background
I've wanted to try on of these out for a while. The mini-itx system has
been available for a couple of years now. What sparked my interest was
the posts that I encountered on Linux forums by folks who wanted to get
these systems up and running in a Linux environment. There is something
cool about running a system on a box that is only a little larger than
a phone book.
Through a set of circumstances, I obtained the following reasonable
bare bones system;
1. VIA-EPIA M10000 motherboard 1ghz Nehemiah processor ($149.00)
2. 512 mb Transend PC 2100 memory ($72.00)
3. Casetronic C158 itx box w/120 watt power supply ($157.00)
4. Seagate 10 gig hard drive lying around collecting dust
Once I assembled the purchased components, I quickly realized that I
had no onboard media drive to install Linux. Fortunately, I has an
external USB CentDyne dvd/cdrw drive that the bios was able to be set
to boot media from. You can add a slimline cdrom or cdrw to the box,
but you need a slimline cdrom ide adapter to hook it up to the
system. This costs $7.00 (lowest price) at Logic Supply. I had a Teac
24X (CD-224E) notebook cdrom hanging around, so it is a matter of
ordering the adapter and
installing the cdrom drive. A current fad of Linux users is using a CF
drive to install a mini-linux system to and the Casetronic system box
comes with an available slot to install such a beast. The adapter costs
$28.00 at Logic Supply. Since I will be trying this out with Puppy
Linux, I fished for yea old credit card once again.
I quickly realized that the 10 gig hard drive was not going to cut it
and instaled a 20 gig Seagate drive in it's place.
Linspire 5 (Development Realease)
I really wanted to run this box as a Linspire system, but the burned cd
hung at initial install with a grub command line (using the USB DVD
drive).
This was my first clue that something was amiss with either the
video or use of a usb cdrom drive. After searching the Linspire support
site (an excellent resource), I found that one could install the distro
by copying the burned Linspire cd files to the hard drive and use grub
to start the installation. One caveat of this method is that you
still need to cd disk in the drive. This time Linspire installed
without incident and I was up and running in under 20 minutes. Linspire
found all the onboard hardware without a problem. After installing some
basic packages, I was happily running Linspire on the system. Two
applications that I found on click-n-run, GenWeb and Gramps (Genealogy
programs) should help with my recent interest in genealogy reseach for
my family.
SuSE 9.1 Pro
I had previously set up the hard drive with one primary fat32
partition. The Suse install ran flawlessly and all hardware was
detected and set up. Using the suse partitioning utility, I allowed
Suse to downsize my fat32 partition and create a reiserfs and swap
partition. I was up an running in about 40 minutes. Tryingto use k3b to
burn a mandriva dvd iso to disk failed multiple times. it seems that
permissions are not set up correctly for cdrecord. K3b suggested runing
k3bsetup2, but this is depreciated in Suse. I decided to move on, as I
wanted to try out a more recent distro to see how the system performed.
Mandriva 2005 Limited Edition
For this installation, I did a hard drive install of Mandriva using
the dvd iso from the fat32 partition. Mandriva installed fine, but on
reboot, the system hung on starting the X server. No command line, just
a blank screen. After some fiddling, I discovered that Mandriva did not
like the "via" video setting in x-org.conf. I was able to use F4 to
change to a console mode and use the vim editor to change the video
driver to normal vesa and KDE came up fine on reboot. I added some
source destinations using Mandriva's urpmi utility with the
following commands;
urpmi.addmedia --distrib nluug- --probe-synthesis --wget
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Mandrake/official/2005/i586/
Puppy Linux
The installation of Puppy was very straightforward. The SuSE
installation made all three of my hard drive partitions primary, thus,
I could not create additional partitions on the drive using qtparted
from the SuSE installation. I elected to do a so called "poor man's
install" which essentially meant that I did the install on the fat32
partition. After editing my Grub file appropriately, Puppy was up and
running without incident.
One note, the Puppy hard drive install utility requires that you have a
floppy on your system to make a boot floppy. The install attempt that I
made to the hard drive failed at detecting the cdrom/dvd drive, so I
could not install Puppy on my hard drive. I should be able to solve
this issue later on.
Puppy can also be installed on a compact flash disk, which makes this
distro appealing. Once I get my CF adapter (which emulates a hard
drive) we will see how the install goes.
Libranet 2.8.1
When I swapped my 20 gig hard drive for the 10 gig drive, I had
Libranet 2.8.1 already installed on the 10 gig drive. Linspire was also
on the hard drive, but failed at boot. Interestingly, Libranet booted
and recognized that my video card had changed and made the necessary
adjustments. All the hardware was configured, including sound.
Nice! Although this version is a bit outdated, it would be interesting
to see how the new 3.0 version would run on this system. Since Libranet
worked fine, it allowed me to make whatever changes I needed to get the
drive up and running the way that I wanted it. One star for Libranet!