Re: [microsound] mini PCs for installations

[Malte Steiner <steiner@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I use Shuttle SN41G2 boxes for installations but seems that they dont 
make them anymore. They come with Nvidia Graphics onboard with dual head 
 and it worked great even for my interactive realtime video and 3D 
installations. They got the NForce chipset for Athlons cpus. Sound can 
be 5.1 and there are ways to get it running multichannel under Linux, 
stereo is no problem at all. Currently I run Ubuntu on them with a 
lightwight Windowsmanager, usually XFCE but guess I will go even lower 
with Blackbox because in the white cube situation it should just run the 
installation and don't need blinkblinkglitz userexperience enhancers 
which just eat up cpu cycles.
But I don't know which are the successors of it. All current offers I 
can see are rather expensive and makes a Mac Mini attractive. Also I 
heard that their quality declined.

VIA looks interesting but take care, their cpus usually are bad at 
floating point operations so they could have problems with realtime 
multimedia stuff and don't scale so well under load. There is a special 
Linux destribution out for their boards:
http://www.epios.net/

Would like to hear more about VIA, too.

Cheers,

Malte

--
Malte Steiner
media art + development
-www.block4.com-

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