Damn small distro

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: Damn small distro
started by: ivan

Posted by ivan on Oct. 18 2003,04:27

i came accross < this > site, and they have some pretty awesome projects. And then it struck me, one of these tiny projects would be prefect for DSL!

so the VIA mainboards and processors arent about to blow away your latest pentium, but at 1GHZ, plus dsl being kind of a minimalist system i think its perfect.

just imagine having < your very own DSL legobox! >

anyone else think that this mini-itx standard of motherboards is just sploogerific, and DSL will make it even better.

Posted by roberts on Oct. 18 2003,05:38

ivan,

I am running DSL on my mini-ITX system right now. It is not fancy but pretty minimal. It is very quiet. No hard drive. I am using a 64MB USB pen drive for my
persistent Phoenix storage. I boot up DSL from bus-card CD into ram, mount USB which has Phoenix and a setup script, run setup and click Phoenix Icon.

Posted by ivan on Oct. 18 2003,06:08

heh, thats cool.
i just discovered mini-itx a few days ago and i love it already.

i think im gonna start one of those projects, an ultra silent system sounds nice. :cool:

Posted by roberts on Oct. 18 2003,06:22

If you are in the US then check out www.logicsupply.com
that is where I got my parts to build my mini-itx.

Posted by wrayal on Oct. 18 2003,16:25

Would it be suicide to try and make a mini-itx that was essentially an overgrown mousemat? The only problem is that dsl cannot run DVDs, which would be a pain.

Posted by thundernblazes on Nov. 01 2003,01:02

Also check out < http://www.mini-box.com >. They even have there own embedded distro called MediaBoxOS.

Posted by roberts on Nov. 01 2003,07:29

They just had s show called the sff show. Small Form Factor. Pictures of whats new in small boxes.

< http://www.sfftech.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=453 >

Posted by Robert Van den Heuvel on Nov. 03 2003,07:53

I run DSL from the ITX platform with a fanless VIA Cyrix CPU @ 533 MHz and it is sweet. No fans, no moving parts, and virtually no power consumption. My case is around the size of a long, flat cigar box but I am miniaturizing further still. Some people have built these systems to resemble a CD-ROM drive in size!

Even more exciting to us nerds is the news (from mini-itx.com two weeks ago) that VIA has just superceded (but not discontinued!) the mini-ITX form factor with the NANO-ITX form factor. Motherboards conforming to NANO-ITX are approx 4.7" square including built-in video, sound, network, USB, serial ports.

With one of the optionally available 50W AC adaptors/power supplies, I imagine you could pack your entire NANO-ITX system into a Nintendo GameCube chassis. Or perhaps even a half-height CD-R spindle container. Add a few glowing LEDs... and it would look real, real cool in the dark.

But I think the ultimate smallness can be had from older Toshiba Libretto laptops with their LCD displays and batteries removed for savings of weight. Such machines weigh less than a pound and will fit in a coat or pants pocket with room to spare. This is my next project, having already done this with an IBM laptop quite successfully. It makes a great network sniffer!

Vive les small computadoras!

Posted by donan71 on Nov. 20 2003,18:32

If you would like i have a forum with a topic for Mini ITX mods ect... If you would like to use it for the ITX part so this board does not get off topic feel free to use it here

< http://beoseh.neo-programmers.com/phpBB2/ >

Please use this board for the DSL part of your systems.

Thanks

--------------
Canadian Be User Group

< http://beoseh.neo-programmers.com >