In the course of my business, I deal with dozens of different embedded PC's. There's one thing I wish players in this space would keep in mind: If you want to take a shot at this window of power and performance (the level at which people start thinking "set-top box") you really have to beat out the $250 netbook I can get at walmart. If my first thought is, "nice form-factor but a netbook/mini-itx/mac-mini solves the problem for the same price", you pretty much lose just because the others are easier to get.
This is what really caught my attention about the Raspberry Pi. It was OpenWRT sized and priced, but promises netbook sized abilities. I just wish I knew how to get a case of them.
I deal with embedded hardware all day long as well. I don't need a case of Raspberry Pis. I need a guarantee that the board will be available for the next five years.
My customers have products that run for that long, even longer. I can't be changing hardware every year because the chip has been end-of-lifed or has become suddenly scarce and the price has quadrupled. And this happens a lot. Even the pico-ITX stuff disappears and reappears constantly, especially when it's from Asia.
Yeah, the one big thing that this one has going for it is its noiselessness due to using its case as a heat sink. Torvalds has also talked about how he wants a "whisper-quiet" computing environment; I'm surprised that so few companies treat this as a design target. It's probably more popular among computers designed to be used as thin clients, which it looks like the mintBox is.
It's nice to see how much you can compress into that small package, though.
>the one big thing that this one has going for it is its noiselessness due to using its case as a heat sink
I am going to disagree with that: IMHO the one big thing being fanless has going for it is lack of need for maintenance. Specifically, without a fan, the case can be designed so that much less dust gets into the case, and dust and moving parts are the main causes of need for maintenance.
The cost-effective way to lower noise is to use better fans (longer blades, better bearings, lower-RPM motors) or to use solid-state drives.
The company that makes the computers featured in the OP also makes a fanless computer powered by an Ivy Bridge Core i7: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/purchase/order-direct-intense-pc/. But they want $836 for the barebones (no RAM, no HDD) version!
One reason the price is so high is that they are forced to use an ultra-low-power (17-W-TDP) processor. If you add just one fan to your design, you can easily accommodate a 65-W-TDP processor, and in fact Intel does not even sell a retail processor (i.e., a processor marketed to people who build their own boxes) with less than 65 W TDP. To be precise, they didn't sell any such retail processors before Ivy Bridge started coming out -- I have not checked since then.
ADDED. I am talking here about systems with some oomph: if an ARM or an embedded-class processor will do the trick, then obviously being noiseless (and compact and low in power consumption and low maintenence) is easy.
Noise bothers me, I even get bothered by the heads resting in a hard drive. It seems that the quieter you get your environment - the more bothered you can become. I've a pretty decent asus gfx card that remains unused, because it has an onboard fan. Both my desktop and laptop are whisper quiet.
I had a friend with a Pentium 4 machine, that he just kept in a nearby cupboard. Once shut behind the door, you couldn't hear it at all. If I was a home owner (and could modify my house at will,) I'd probably just place my PC in another room (preferably a store), and channel cables through the wall. Would be cheaper than wasting money on over-priced cooling. The good thing about this, is that you also don't have to worry so much about what your PC looks like. You can even mount a motherboard in something like a biscuit tin.
A desktop is usually noisy. Recently it gets really hot where I live, and I can see the noise difference my desktop fans make VS the same conditions in Winter... By the way, are there some manufacturers of desktop cases which you could recommend to reduce the noise?
I like your idea of having the PC in a different room than the actual screen and controls. But that's not really an option if you rent an apartment and cannot drill holes through the walls :)
There's lots of good advice on building silent PCs. I actually have a roomy desktop case, a Lian Li, a passive GFX card, an energy efficient CPU and only one big CPU fan, and a pretty silent energy efficient PSU. These were all picked with noise in mind when I last built my desktop PC. My case actually is pretty thin alu, it resonates because of the hard drive and thin chassis, so I've had to tediously dampen the drives with rubber (I wouldn't recommend that case.) Some of the older cases - I'm talking a naughties case, can be found (probably at the local tip) that are incredibly thick, and these make for a better quieter unit in my opinion - but at the same time they can be quite ugly. But then again - most PCs are ugly!
A friend of mine just picked up a Pentium 4 (yes all my friends have P4s), for £20, with a nice thick case, but the thing sounded like a helicopter taking off - the fans were so loud. We replaced the CPU fan (something like an Arctic freezer), and now it's quite easy on the ears.
My PC case is hugely bloated for my needs, I barely touch the DVD unit anymore, so I could just throw it in a trunk. Or make a new chassis for it. I only keep it as the size doesn't make me curse whenever I have to go in there. How about a piano stool for a case?
I think my favourite case I ever had was a micro ATX case that I modded to accommodate the PSU on the front. I could then keep it on the floor and still turn it off easily. As it was low down it was quieter. It also served as a rather nice foot warmer.
This does beat the $250 netbook, but possibly not along axes you care enough about. The fact they're marrying the distro to the hardware is a pretty big win in itself.
In short: they're not selling to you, so your not buying it doesn't mean they lose.
"This is what really caught my attention about the Raspberry Pi. I just wish I knew how to get a case of them."
Check out BeagleBone - more expensive than RasberryPi, but they are available. I'm running a BeagleBone as a DNSMASQ server. Linux with package management and full-blown development tools running inside an Altoids tin - yeah! All of these small/cheap/silent linux boards are pretty incredible & there is more to come.
The Bone is currently among my favorites, if not the favorite. I second your recommendation. I liked the Globalscale Sheeva/Guru/Dream for a while but their terrible build quality and ever changing spec put me off them quickly.
When I need graphics (mostly we drive plasma displays for signage) I usually use a Lanner. (http://www.lannerinc.com/Embedded_Computing) Fanless, cooled through aluminum case, generally indestructible and less than $300 each in bulk.
If you just want to throw a switch via wifi, a TP-link 703N with OpenWRT can do it for you for even less than the cost of a RasPi. I've got one opening my garage door from my iPhone.
My family just got an Apple TV and I'm very impressed at the fit and finish, but I was disappointed at the lack of features. I would love a more open device where I could install whatever I want. For example I would love to mirror my display, have better integration with Android and web browse directly on the box. Any recommendation for good media center software to install on the mintBox that can do this?
I second OpenElec, which is effectively a minimal OS which boots straight to XBMC. I threw it on my aspire revo and it ran beautifully while using under 300mb of HDD. It pulls media wirelessly from my server and I use the android XMBC Remote to control it.
I would warn that it probably worked so well for me because they have a build specifically for nvidia ion graphics based machines. Saying that though, they also have builds for Fusion HTPCs, Intel, XTreamer, Apple TV, and a generic build with or without proprietary graphics drivers.
I'm curious: what do you see as the advantage of Ubuntu over Mint? My understanding is that Mint is just Ubuntu with a different default desktop environment and some multimedia codecs.
Do you just like Unity? (For what it's worth, I actually like it as well.)
Well, fundamentally, there is nothing in Mint I can't have in Ubuntu (and sort of vice versa, though I don't know if Mint has Unity yet). Those codecs, for instance, are a click away in Ubuntu (either at install time or in Software Center).
That being said, I prefer Unity to any of the DE in Mint. Plus there's HUD and I'm going to assume all the other stuff Canonical is going to put out soon. I'm one of those people REALLY looking forward to being able to buy an Ubuntu for Android phone. I mean REALLY looking forward to it. In that case, I'll like the consistency of Ubuntu everywhere (Perhaps we'll see a TV soon with Ubuntu TV on it...that would be sweet. etc.).
Nothing against Mint. They are doing something pretty cool, just not my cup of tea.
As someone who's never used Mac OS, I much prefer Mint over normal Ubuntu. With Mint everything seems pretty natural to me, and it doesn't feel like I have to relearn almost anything at all. With Ubuntu, my first experiences with it were pretty frustrating, and I was even complaining to a more Linux-loving friend that I find it even less intuitive than Windows. Mint actually seems more intuitive than Windows to me.
Ubuntu has a huge community that makes any question you have easily Googlable, as well as a much more mature ecosystem in general. Even if they're built on the same foundation, these little things really make a difference and ease headaches.
And really, you can't write off the simple fact that its been around and strong for so many years. You can rest assured that it will continue to be.
I don't really understand your point. You can install the exact same thing on Mint as on Ubuntu. Both environments are very similar, and you can have the more resource efficient Cinnamon as Framework on Mint instead of Unity on Ubuntu. It's basically the same thing, and Mint benefits from the very strong Ubuntu foundation,.
What kind of problems are you referring to that is easier to search for Ubuntu than LinuxMint? I've installed and deployed quite a few LinuxMint computers to folks with little to no computer experience. Throughout, I've never had any issues with not being able to quickly find answers for the few problems that I ran into.
It is. From the article: "The mintBox is a CompuLab fit-PC3 unit, with a green retro-lit Linux Mint logo, and 10% of each sale goes towards Linux Mint."
I think a product like this is a great idea for a Linux distro.
That is a confusing site (the Fit-PC site) because it talks about and AMD based 9WTDP design but all of the indicated re sellers only have Atom based designs.
For $250, I've built an Android and Ubuntu tablet, using the Pandaboard ES as the base with a 10.1" capacitive touchscreen (multi-touch).
It functions extremely well and makes me wonder why no serious manufacturers are pursuing this avenue right now .. it seems to me to be a very powerful combination of parts.
Ripe opportunities abound for anyone with the skills to bootstrap a hardware startup constructing such things. I sure wish I had the gumption to do it (I could handle the software side, anyway..)
Although the metal makes the mintBox heavier than other devices its size, it makes it feel really unique, robust and well engineered.
This sentence really turned me off. If you're going to sell something as well engineered then don't say it feels that way. Give the results of drop tests or heat dissipation tests.
For anyone thinking of trying Mint; they will install customized search engines in your Firefox and Chromium, it is a shit experience, and it is irritating to remove or avoid.
I would suggest you do not use Mint if you plan on doing any internet searching.
This is a little ridiculous: you can trivially add the DuckDuckGo (or Google) search provider; e.g. on the right-hand side of the DDG search page[1] there is a "Add to Firefox" (and presumably similarly for Chromium) link that you can just click, and it just works.
I know, but I wanted Google, and I found it difficult to remove the branded search and switch to basic Google. It's not a ridiculous complaint, I just think if they are willing to treat their users like that it will only get worse in the future. I jumped off of Ubuntu because of Unity, though, so I might be feeling very "once bitten..."
That is quite understandable, but think of it from a scrupulous person's perspective. You could make your default search Google, in which case you're sending your user a mixed message: "I am giving you the popular search" versus "I don't actually care about your privacy."
What's worse is, it's generally a conflict of interest. At least at one point (and perhaps it's still the case) Google was paying Mozilla for the privilege of being the default search provided on Firefox. Don't get me wrong, I like money going towards Mozilla; but I'd prefer that Mozilla not have to sell Firefox users' privacy for it.
Google Search is still a bit better than DDG at very recent news, at exposing cached pages, and at calculating natural language expressions. Sometimes they are better on relevance but for most searches DDG does very well. In some sense the freshness of Google Search is its only real remaining advantage in the marketplace: the Internet Archive has long been better for long-term caching, and Wolfram Alpha now does a much better job with some natural language queries.
("Some" because astonishingly, Wolfram Alpha does not have a syntax of composition. What I mean is, you can just ask Wolfram Alpha "Schwarzschild radius of the Sun" and it will answer that if the Sun got beneath 6 km wide, it would collapse into a black hole. But don't try to append the words "in light-seconds" or "/ speed of light" to that query, don't even wrap it in parentheses, because Wolfram Alpha will suddenly look at you and say, "WTF does any of that mean?!?!?")
I bypass the search box. By adding a keyword search (inspired by Opera,) to my browser (Firefox.) Then when I want to search, I hit CTRL + L and then type something like 'dd search term' for say duck duck, then hit return. I can set up multiple keyword searches - which I find personally more flexible.
You loose suggest which is slightly annoying, but I can live with that.
Really? Is there no way around that? Ie just change your browser search settings? I was looking to try out mint, cuz Ubuntu is leaving something to be desired these days.
It's just a simple package that's installed with Firefox. The parent is just making it seem like a huge deal, but it's trivial to remove the package and/or change your default search provider.
I eventually got it, but I did end up doing the registry and mucking out some bits in /etc. Then I figured, "hey, I haven't tried Debian yet." So that's probably my next step... but it's looking like if you want it done right you're going to have to compile it yourself :/
From there you just have to click the icon of the one you want. They should put them at the top of that page and not the bottom though (I added the anchor to the bottom of the page).
Fair enough, but I had an edge case where I wanted to use Pentadactyl, and it kept using the branded search as default no matter how I tried to tweak the settings. I eventually got rid of it, but it was infuriating for me that there was no simple way to hit, "I don't want this," and have it removed totally.
Linux Mint user here: This was never a big issue for me. They explain it thoroughly at http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php and let you click through to install Google (plain vanilla, non-custom Google) very easily. Plus, so far this only affects Firefox, their default browser. If you use Chrom[e|ium] like I do, it's even less of an issue.
I really think the parent comment is an overreaction.
Did they install it after you installed your browser? If they did then that sucks. Otherwise it's not that bad. Probably a source of funding for the project.
It's just with the default browser and yes, it's a main source of funding. This is what they say about it:
Search engines help fund Linux Mint: Search engines share with Linux Mint the revenue generated for them by Linux Mint users. The following search engines share revenue with us: Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo and Amazon. By using these engines for search or to make purchases, you help fund the Linux Mint project.
Easy installation of other engines: Clear explanations and easy instructions are there in Linux Mint for users to understand why some engines aren't installed by default and how to easily install them.
It is a source of funding, which would be fine with me, but it was also basically unusable, and it would give me weird results that I didn't get on regular Google. I also had a bit of trouble removing it. So bad experience for me overall.
Edit: no, they weren't so sinister as to install it with another package, it's part of the Firefox extensions in the default install.
Since Linux Mint 12 this is not the case anymore. They listened to their users, and removed the Google Custom Search.
As a convenience to its users, Linux Mint has a dedicated webpage where you can easily add search easily with one click: http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php You can of course add search engines in any other Firefox supported way also.
The photos are made with a cheap digicam with no lighting. I'm not saying this to complain, but to praise.
That's because the photos prove (at least to me) that the project is done in someone's bedroom at almost no cost at all.
That someone at this level of business development can defy laws of business and offer something like the mintBox is amazing and is a sign of how the times have changed.
Ten years ago, no one would have dreamt of this sort of thing.
Then again, forty years ago they would have. That was also the most amazing time for computer science, when the seminal advancements were being made that still continue to resonate with the world. So maybe, with the whole maker crowd, and statup biz, and this sort of mintBox ramshack business mentality, we're looking at another golden age?
This is what really caught my attention about the Raspberry Pi. It was OpenWRT sized and priced, but promises netbook sized abilities. I just wish I knew how to get a case of them.