mdlbear | bizarre (Reply)

Spent the morning setting up my new VIA EPIA 5000 board, a fanless, 500MHz Mini-ITX board. Very weird: it has a tendency to shut itself off in the middle of booting, except when there's a CD-ROM drive attached. Or else it's something else. I'm also using a compact flash drive in an IDE adapter; it's possible that the power supply just needs a larger or more consistent load. Or maybe it's just plain flaky -- I'm not sure yet.

The alleged excuse for this thing is to have a silent X terminal for recording, and it is silent. Scary, even with a reasonably quiet but not fanless power supply. The video seems a little flickery, but that might just be the cables (which are ancient). If it manages to stay up without crashing I'm going to like it.

I originally tried installing DSL on it, and in fact succeeded, but DSL insists on running the blasted Knoppix autodetect stuff even when it's on a hard drive, and insists on firing up an X session. I'd probably be better off with a pure X terminal, but in fact what I ended up installing was plain old Debian Etch, which I'm very comfortable with. Works great. It's using half of its 160MB of RAM, and less than 40% of a 1.2GB partition on the flash. I may chop it down if I decide I need the 2GB flash for something more useful.