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Linux Mint itself has not "ditched" anything. Mint, being Linux, still supports both Intel and AMD just fine. The Mint Team also did not ditch anything, because this machine is not made by the Mint Team. As they note in their own press release that the summary failed to link to, the Mintbox is based on Compulab's Fitlet microcomputer.

The recently-released Fitlet2 is what switched from an AMD SoC to an Intel SoC. The Mintbox is simply a branded Fitlet, with SSD and RAM included (Fitlet can be bought barebones) and Linux Mint pre-installed. Nothing more than that. So the Mint Team didn't really have a say in what SoC the new generation unit used.

That being said, I have a Fitlet 1 myself and I love it. I'm quite a fan of Compulab's whole range of micro and mini computers. Which is why I'd like to see them actually get credit for this machine, which they make. :P At least Mint Team's press release credited them.

Awesome post. The Dell Venue 11 Pro looks like a promising option.
Another post mentioned this: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/prod... which might work ok with a zotac or intel NUC.
I also really like the kangaroo but I wish they would come out with a little more powerful version.
I'm still probably leaning towards a dell XPS 13 or an alienware 13 system as they are small enough to carry but still powerful
but the dell venue 11 pro although not quite as powerful is probably good enough for my needs and considerably cheaper.

I haven't tried this myself, but from the specs it looks to be reasonable inexpensive, reasonably small and light, and reasonably powerful:

- Intel NUC (about 1 pound)
- fit-Uptime UPS for mini-PCs (about 0.5 pound and should power the NUC for maybe 1-3 hours on battery, depending on exact model of NUC etc)

Correct.

You can. The Mintbox is just a branded version of the Fitlet micro PC. The summary doesn't mention this, but on the Mintbox blog entry itself they do point this out, and provide links to Fit PC which makes the Fitlets. You can buy unbranded barebones Fitlets. Fit PC sells them from their Amazon store. I have a Fitlet myself, they are awesome little machines, and so I'm totally gonna reply here and evangelize for 'em. :)

The model that Mintbox uses is the new fitlet-RM-iA10. If you want more RAM, look at the fitlet-H model. It uses the same AMD SoC, same GPU, same audio, same LAN chipset, etc. etc. etc. The only differences are that it comes in a slightly larger case (about the size of the average consumer AP/internet gateway like a Netgear or something), and that larger case allows it to fit a full 2.5" SATA drive, have a couple more USB ports, has one extra mini-PCIe slot inside, and--the reason I mention it to you--lets it fit two SO-DIMMs for a total of 16GB.

Here's a link that will show you a side-by-side comparison of the fitlet-H and the Mintbox Pro.

You can. The Mintbox is just a branded version of the Fitlet micro PC. The summary doesn't mention this, but on the Mintbox blog entry itself they do point this out, and provide links to Fit PC which makes the Fitlets. You can buy unbranded barebones Fitlets. Fit PC sells them from their Amazon store. I have a Fitlet myself, they are awesome little machines, and so I'm totally gonna reply here and evangelize for 'em. :)

The model that Mintbox uses is the new fitlet-RM-iA10. If you want more RAM, look at the fitlet-H model. It uses the same AMD SoC, same GPU, same audio, same LAN chipset, etc. etc. etc. The only differences are that it comes in a slightly larger case (about the size of the average consumer AP/internet gateway like a Netgear or something), and that larger case allows it to fit a full 2.5" SATA drive, have a couple more USB ports, has one extra mini-PCIe slot inside, and--the reason I mention it to you--lets it fit two SO-DIMMs for a total of 16GB.

Here's a link that will show you a side-by-side comparison of the fitlet-H and the Mintbox Pro.

You can. The Mintbox is just a branded version of the Fitlet micro PC. The summary doesn't mention this, but on the Mintbox blog entry itself they do point this out, and provide links to Fit PC which makes the Fitlets. You can buy unbranded barebones Fitlets. Fit PC sells them from their Amazon store. I have a Fitlet myself, they are awesome little machines, and so I'm totally gonna reply here and evangelize for 'em. :)

The model that Mintbox uses is the new fitlet-RM-iA10. If you want more RAM, look at the fitlet-H model. It uses the same AMD SoC, same GPU, same audio, same LAN chipset, etc. etc. etc. The only differences are that it comes in a slightly larger case (about the size of the average consumer AP/internet gateway like a Netgear or something), and that larger case allows it to fit a full 2.5" SATA drive, have a couple more USB ports, has one extra mini-PCIe slot inside, and--the reason I mention it to you--lets it fit two SO-DIMMs for a total of 16GB.

Here's a link that will show you a side-by-side comparison of the fitlet-H and the Mintbox Pro.

The pictures show two ethernet ports: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/prod...

I know what it's related to, except that the NUC is not a laptop. Laptops are common and are used in situations mostly run on battery or on the move. NUCs are as you said niche products. Niche products typically fit niche requirements. i.e. small computers sitting on the back of a piece of equipment, in a piece of equipment, etc. In that regard 12V is a far more suitable choice and one that is easily made by many of its competitors.

Side note lithium chemistry sits around 3.7V nominal. The difference between a 12V supply and a 19V supply is the number of cells in series, and DC-DC converters are incredibly trivial to design (it's a typical 3rd-4th year university project to design one with quite stringent requirements). If you're right (and you could be) then it would be an incredibly disappointing move by Intel.

So far I've seen several people pass up NUCs for niche applications. Personally in my last application I've gone with: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/. Power it from 12V supply, a car cigarette lighter or a 4 cell lithium battery.

Okay. http://www.fit-pc.com/web/prod...

How about something smaller than Intel's NUC, more powerful, fanless and reasonably cheap. Something like the fitlet for example. And VESA Mountable too.

... is no.

The thing you propose sounds fine. But do they really want to upgrade all of the pumps at once? Sounds like a great way to brick an entire facility.

The only "improvement" I could think of would be to set up some kind of cheap router that can do MAC address filtering, that way you can set up the router to allow only one of each pump to show up as that one silly IP address at a time on a switched network. But then you'll still be able to only do one at a time.

The "right" way to do this is just throw money at the problem and attach a real computer to each pump, with a separate interface to talk to the static IP. Maybe something as small as http://www.fit-pc.com/web/prod... or just some generic mini-ITX board in a telecom chassis or whatever.

CompuLab's Fitlet does that to the NUC.

http://www.fit-pc.com/web/prod...

I use hostapd running on Slackware on a FitPC2i. It has far more processing power than any ARM or MIPS based router, more RAM, dual GigE, and takes a 2TB 2.5" SATA HDD (it came with a 16GB SSD) so it doubles as a file server and darknet node. Also it's fanless and low power.

I guess I might use OpenBSD if I was going to do it again, other than that, I would do everything the same.

If I just needed a minimal and cheap access point or client access router, or had to deploy lots of routers, I would use many of the fine products Mikrotik make. They are easy to setup, with an IOS like (but more intuitive, type-completey, self-documenting) commandline interface, and have a good feature set, and extremely good performance for the price.

If I was building an datacenter Layer 3 fabric, I would evaluate the currently available Openflow compatible switches, and setup a few servers as Openflow directors.

Specs for the CPU itself seem oddly hard to come by. However, it looks like there are some barebones/appliance systems shipping based on it:

This reports the 847E has having Intel HD2000. Performance should be nice and dreadful; but it should at least work fairly smoothly.

This one isn't as informative on the spec sheet; but the VGA driver download, when I tested it, refers only to support for processors with some Intel HD graphics, not any of the atom models with powerVR crap.

I'll wait for somebody else to bite; but my money would be on a low-clocked; but reasonably well supported, Intel GPU.

Try building your own x86 PC that takes 5 watts out of the wall.

Why build it?

http://www.fit-pc.com/web/purchase/order-fit-pc2i/

It's actually 6 watts. So, you've got me there.

Get a zotac zbox with nvidia onboard card.

Yawn... yeah, wake me up when someone finally starts selling the pico-ITX nVidia ION reference design
http://www.anandtech.com/print/2688

I did replace my tower Linux server with one of those Zotac mini-ITX IONs in a shoebox PC last year. Thanks to the GPU, I can even use it to do some light web browsing, and view videos like you say.

Too bad Intel dorked up ION2, with the 1x PCIe GPU bottleneck.

I've played with the fit-PC too, but with the crap Intel GPU with proprietary driver binary blobs, it's pretty useless. Other parts of the chipset (like the sata controller) is also problematic on older linux distros.
http://www.fit-pc.com/web/

Here are the fanless systems I have used :

* Neo . The whole case is an aluminum radiator, with fins on two sides, and holes.
It died after 4 years (DC input capacitor on mobo, I guess).

* FitPC2i . The aluminum case is the radiator, with no fins, no holes (except for connectors).
Very small. Still running fine after 1 year (in the dust).

Both systems are silent - 0db - with solid state storage. Instead of SSD I use USB key and mmc on the FitPC2i.

Various configurations use those fanless cases, you can find some more suited to your needs

Why not just grab a fit-PC2? http://www.fit-pc.com/web/

As an alternative to the Apple TV/Mac mini, you could consider the fit-PC2 or fit-PC2i. It is a small, low-power, fanless computer using the atom-processor. Full hardware video acceleration of H.264, MPEG2, VC1, and WMV9 using the Intel GMA500 (not sure if linux will be able to use this however).

8W at full cpu load.

Possibility of built-in IR receiver depending on which model you choose.

http://www.fit-pc.com/web/

Word... I'd love to throw these little mouse-sized computers at everything for work, but can't really use their binary driver packages that can only really be shoehorned in to a particular ubuntu release.

Had to go with a mini-itx nVidia ION platform instead... which admittedly has much better performance and driver support, but is ~8 times the size and thus actually needs space and mounting hardware allocated for it. I wish some manufacturer would sell the nano-itx ION reference platform (hint hint easy money)... that was almost as small as a Fit-PC2 and had all the interfaces we wanted. But blargh.

Word... I'd love to throw these little mouse-sized computers at everything for work, but can't really use their binary driver packages that can only really be shoehorned in to a particular ubuntu release.

Had to go with a mini-itx nVidia ION platform instead... which admittedly has much better performance and driver support, but is ~8 times the size and thus actually needs space and mounting hardware allocated for it. I wish some manufacturer would sell the nano-itx ION reference platform (hint hint easy money)... that was almost as small as a Fit-PC2 and had all the interfaces we wanted. But blargh.

They're getting there, just be patient!

I'm about the evaluate the Fit-PC2 for work, which can be had in diskless forms for under $250. http://www.fit-pc.com/

And I'm currently posting from an EeePC 901 running eeebuntu, which is actually quite a bit better and can be had for under $200. Plug in an external monitor, and rig up the built-in LCD and peripherals as a fancy KVM switching interface for your various VNC, RDP, VMware, NX, etc. backends. I'm really impressed by the Compiz desktop performance, so you can still get pretty slick transitions between various sessions on different virtual desktops.

And I'm really looking forward to the explosion of new nVidia ION netbooks and nettops, which will actually give a real nVidia 9400 GPU and dual-core Atom processors to these "thin clients", which means they can actually be used more or less like a real box in terms of running web-based interfaces and things without stuttering and pausing occasionally.

So with a dirt-cheap nettop, unfortunately you'll pay a little bit more than your target, but at least you get extra features (like a small SSD, built-in speakers, keyboard/mouse/multitouchpad, and maybe even a webcam, etc. that you could probably put to good use with a bit of creativity.

I use a Fit-PC for my home Linux server. It came with Ubuntu and Gentoo installed. It uses 6W and easily handles my e-mail, DNS, ssh, apache, and file-serving needs.

I picked up one of these:
http://www.fit-pc.com/fit-pc1/whats-new.html
for $200. It's running Ubuntu 8.04 with LXDE pretty reasonably and being an excellent Squeezebox Server. Peaks at 5W and is fanless, so it's virtually silent.
Previously I used an old laptop, but the fan whine drove me nuts and it was sucking 15-20W even at idle.
The 330Gb Hard drive cost me an extra $150 and it only works with parallel ATA, but worth a look.

After running a fire-breathing Celeron 2.5GHz as router/fileserver/torrentbox/freepbx for a few months, I finally bit the bullet and picked up a soekris net5501 and installed pfsense and freeswitch on it. My firewalling and phones run right at well under 20 watts.

Of course that leaves me without fileserver or torrentbox, but an inexpensive alix or fit pc running freenas will fill that role nicely.

The Greenest is the Fit-PC

http://www.fit-pc.com/new/

but you wont get performance or Vista running...

They're called 'nettops' -- MSI and Asus both make them, as well as Koolu, CompuLab, and Everex.

A fit-PC has two ethernet ports.
I have a fit-PC, and do use it. Not as fast, possibly, and double the consumption, but what the heck. It works. Although it probably is more expensive.
Also, why are we talking about old news? Oh. It's a slow day for slashdot.

without all the "cloud" mumbo jumbo. http://www.fit-pc.com./

how many routers can run on USB's maximum 500mA though?

I'd wager it could be done with some commodity routers and perhaps even some specialized hardware. The fit-pc, for example takes 5V and claims power usage in the 3-5W range. That should run well enough on a USB power supply (or even greener using flash in place of the hdd) and provide all the functionality you could want using linux or m0n0wall.

db

Perhaps a little off on the fit-PC dimensions.
120 mm = 4.72 inches
116 mm = 4.57 inches
40 mm = 1.57 inches
http://www.fit-pc.com/specifications.htm
Also, be my guest if you want to run a 500 MHz AMD CPU in a 70C room, which is the temperature of a hot cup of green tea (you're supposed to provide hotter temperatures for black tea etc. but I digress...).
Perhaps Apple's 10-35C figure is on the cautionary side. What else would cause them to have different operating temperatures? Apple gave conservative battery life for the iPod mini but gave somewhat exaggerative figures for the iPod video's. Take anything with a grain of salt, I guess.

The light weight of the fit-PC looks attractive (just 450 g as opposed to the 1.31 kg mini). However, people who are comparing the fit-PC with the mini are assuming that people will want to get a Mac and wipe clean a perfectly fine software package. I think it's fair to guess that this is a rather small percentage of the people who buy minis.

Both the Apple-is-cheap & Apple-is-expensive sides of the debate have a point. Apple chooses which products to price competitively, and which to make expensive. The iPods and Macs are in general competitively priced while iSight, MagSafe power adapter, iPod leather case, and early adopter iPhones were priced on the expensive side. It depends.

http://www.fit-pc.com/shipping-cost.htm/ says that the shipping cost is $40 first unit in North America, $20 in Israel, $60 in Europe, and $80 in other locations, plus $10/15/5/20 per additional unit in the same categories.

Where did you get $95 from?

Another lovely company that tricks you with outrageous shipping costs to artificially drop the "price" of the computer. Also, check out the super friendly support and warranty policies.

Do yourselves a favor and get a VIA-based mini-itx board for that kind of money.

Seems you can get a VB7001G (1.5Ghz) for about $130; add in $30 for 512MB of ram (2x the fitPC), and however much you feel like spending on a compactflash card, USB memory key, or smaller laptop drive. Say, $50 for a 60GB drive (more than the fitPC's 40). $40 for a picoPSU; $30 for a AC adapter. Buy a crap case for $30 if you don't have one you can use already. Install a gigabit NIC for under $20 (dunno if there are any cheap dual-interface gigabit NICs.) That's under $310, and quite a bit more bang for the buck. It probably won't be 5w, but it'll be well under 20w given that board seems to use about 10w.

If you want to go even cheaper, intel is fighting back against via, like with the D201GLY. It's $70, 1.3ghz celeron, DDR2 ram...

Another lovely company that tricks you with outrageous shipping costs to artificially drop the "price" of the computer. Also, check out the super friendly support and warranty policies.

Do yourselves a favor and get a VIA-based mini-itx board for that kind of money.

Seems you can get a VB7001G (1.5Ghz) for about $130; add in $30 for 512MB of ram (2x the fitPC), and however much you feel like spending on a compactflash card, USB memory key, or smaller laptop drive. Say, $50 for a 60GB drive (more than the fitPC's 40). $40 for a picoPSU; $30 for a AC adapter. Buy a crap case for $30 if you don't have one you can use already. Install a gigabit NIC for under $20 (dunno if there are any cheap dual-interface gigabit NICs.) That's under $310, and quite a bit more bang for the buck. It probably won't be 5w, but it'll be well under 20w given that board seems to use about 10w.

If you want to go even cheaper, intel is fighting back against via, like with the D201GLY. It's $70, 1.3ghz celeron, DDR2 ram...

Way to write an article about a 5W system and then forgetting to tell us the expected battery life.

It doesn't use a battery. The package comes with an AC adapter