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On hunting around, I found the EPIA Linux Howto, which is a January 2004 publication (apparently), and fairly nifty. In the chapter on video support, the editor interjects with a clarifying comment about hardware MPEG support, stating, "The source code is available to large OEM customers under NDA/licensing agreements. It is not available to end-users." Strike one for open source.

The video drivers for EPIA-M boards can be downloaded from their CLE266 Linuxpage. There is a note about source code at the bottom of this page. They say the following about full source code access: "Users need to sign Binary License Agreement (BLA) and Source Code Addendum (SCABLA) to obtain the source. Typically, only requests from companies developing product for sale will be approved." Strike two for open source.

But there's a more limited source release available, apparently, and for that you need to go to the VIA Open Source Developer's Data Request Form. Here you will be warmly greeted with the following notice, accompanied by a honking great form full of mandatory personal information fields.

VIA want to make available code and other resources to appropriate open source developers. In order to be accepted into the programme and have downloads made available, requests must be made via this form.

Once the form is complete, has been submitted and reviewed, your application may be approved. If successful you will receive an e-mail to the address specified by you on this form. This mail must be responded to otherwise your access will not be enabled.

VIA's open source support is weak at best. Maybe there are good reasons why they are obliged to put obstacles in the way of everything, rather than just providing the damn code, but their pitch as given leaves me pretty cold. I like their stuff, but I'm sick of half-baked software support.

However, I haven't tried the program and I have no idea just what it actually does, as it is only avaiable for Windows and Redhat 9.0. I imagine that the source will be "available" to "approved" developers.

Watch the viaarena.com forums.

here are the drivers.
"In case the driver binary does not work properly or contains bugs, its source code is available for users to modify and compile"
and here are the tech specs.

go knock yourself out

> My laptop has an LCD screen, but I don't get confused when I go into Windows display properties and see an icon for a CRT.

Ah, but Microsoft has updated the Windows control panel icon for Displays. And they've done so at a point in time (2001) when CRT's are still hugely common (and useful). Compare the CRT to a floppy, and the floppy is far more obsolete.

I just asked my non-geek roommate, "What's the last time you used a floppy disk?" And he thought for a minute and said, "I can't remember!" That's how yesterday the floppy disk is. Sure, it's needed to boot a computer that's so old it can't boot from CD, but that just means a rescue floppy has a place in a PC maint/repair kit, along with spare jumpers, and a Windows 95 install CD. It doesn't make it any less obsolete.

I've heard good things about KnoppMyth, and it's certainly worth a try. I figured I would have to start from scratch, since the Epia required a lot of patching for the kernel. For the Gentoo boys and girls, epia.kalf.org has a lot of good Epia specific Gentoo ebuilds. The Linux OS forums at Viaarena.com also offer a good amount of information. For the PVR 350/250 users, IVTV has a Wiki with lots of good info, including getting the TV out on the PVR350 working.

Try viaarena. They have a couple of linux walkthroughs. They have a Linux forum as well.

You can't call the Pentium or Itanic open standards.

The opcodes are known and well documented. Multiple companies besides Intel has created their own reimplementation of the "x86 standard". Dozens more individual programmers have duplicated it in software.

It seems much like an open standard.

Actually, see this thread on Via's board. Someone has reverse-engineered the mpeg driver. It seems possible that hardware support for the Epia will get standardized after all.
Mike

Really? Everything I've read seems to indicate that software decoding on these boards results in dropped frames. Besides, I'm just not willing to pay a premium for a device that's capable of hardware MPEG decoding if the company that makes it isn't completely behind my operating system of choice. Even less so in this case, as VIA has been claiming full support for Linux.

Then you must not be using Linux. Some cool folks like this guy (not to mention this guy) are working hard at making Linux work on the EPIA -- but it doesn't have to be this hard. I've been keeping my eye on these MiniITX boards for some time now, but I'm waiting until I can do everything I want (play DVDs and DivX files, maybe run a couple emulators) without reverse-engineering drivers. Maybe this new board will make it happen.

Via release some non-NDA documentation. VIA Arena Open Source Portal offers documentation for VIA ATA, NIC and display (The S3/Via Savage core) The having-to-register-then-wait model is a pain in the ass, but there is no NDA attached to it.

Still not as good as companies such as Intel, AMD or Matrox but better than others (nVidia, Creative)

Not sure if the following contradicts this or not, but this page at mini-itx.com states (emphasis mine)

The original EPIAs and EPIA Vs are very well supported under most recent kernels (EPIA 5000, EPIA 800, EPIA V5000, EPIA V8000). The EPIA Ms are less well supported (EPIA ME6000, M9000, M10000). Drivers exist in binary format only for MPEG2 acceleration, Sound and USB 2.0. Some distributions will have problems.

... doesn't inspire confidence in me with their past track record of problems. Given my past experience with the Asus AV7266, I steer clear of all products using their chips.

VIA says they support USB 2.0 in kernel 2.5.2 or later.

Star Wars Millenium Falcon which I recently created. You can also see a video of how it was created here

The EPIA-M's aren't very well supported on Linux at all. The bare minimum will work, but there is a lot of work to be done, especially on VIA's part.
...
VIA should not claim that the EPIA-M is Linux compatible, unless it is actively supporting the Linux community by improving support to at least a level of being able to take advantage of most of the hardware's features. I hope VIA becomes more actively involved in the future.

USB 2.0: I have been in contact with David Brownwell for the past two months in an attempt to resolve the issues with the VT8235's EHCI support in general. Most people will experience system hangs when they attempt to use the EHCI controller, although it is improving. VIA has apparently provided David with hardware, but with little support. As of late, the problem seems to extend beyond the VT8235's EHCI - on another VT8235 based board, it was revealed that there are IRQ/PCI issues causing any USB 2.0 card (e.g. an NEC which is usually stable) to hang.

Audio: ALSA should work for the EPIA-Ms with their ALC650, but the OSS drivers are still a better option in my opinion. The original EPIAs will experience problems with ALSA (crackly sound on new versions of ALSA, no sound at all on previous). The OSS driver in newer kernels (e.g. 2.4.21-pre5-acX) works well with OSS playback, but there are two major problems:

1. ESound does not work. This limits the user to only one stream to pass through the sound card. This can generate problems with applications such as web browsers which use the Flash plugin (especially if another sound application is already running - e.g. XMMS)
2. Recording does not work whatsoever. This is a major problem that I am yet to talk to Alan about, but there is absolutely no recording with OSS drivers. ALSA drivers have more success with this, but the audio quality is poor.

VGA: This will work nicely if you're running one of VIA's supported distribution versions. This is not good for people like myself who insist on using updated kernels to work with other features of their hardware. This limits us to using the Slim driver for the CLE266, removing MPEG2 hardware acceleration. I am developing a distribution that is to be bundled with EPIA-M systems, and even after mentioning that, sending two emails to VIA and signing up on the driver request page has proven fruitless and are completely ignored.

I haven't tested this myself, but I believe there are problems with VIA's CLE266 drivers when it comes to virtual screens. The driver simply cannot handle them.

NIC: This works flawlessly, with the via-rhine driver. There are no problems to report.

FireWire: I have no idea about this one either, but I can say that the host controller is at least recognised by the Linux driver. I'd love to hear from anyone who has tested the EPIA-M's firewire on Linux.

As the review says, the VIA mini-ITX motherboard crams in lots of built-in devices, like Ethernet, IEEE 1394, audio, MPEG2 decoder, and NTSC/PAL output. If you want to run Linux on it, you might want to check out the device driver issues on the VIA Arena Forum on the subject.

It is nice, however, that Hush Technologies sells Microsoft Windows as a separate line item.

I just built a system very similar to these, and it's a blast, but there are some problems. One is that the Morex 55W power supply seems to have some issues, particularly at boot-up, that can result in a hung system. Another is heat. The EPIA boards don't generate a lot, but they do generate some, and other components (e.g. hard disk) do too. VIA does not recommend running the M-9000 fanless; that's precisely why I bought an ME-6000, and the case does have two (very quiet) case fans, and I've still had a couple of lockups that might be attributable to heat. Other users at VIA Arena using the same mobo/case combination have reported very similar problems. Overall, there seems to be a growing feeling among the community of people who've actually bought them that systems built around these components might not be silent and stable at the same time. Pick one. :-( Maybe the next generation will be capable of running silently without these stability problems, and it's fine for a hobby project, but I couldn't really recommend this type of system for regular use.

There's a castlerock driver in xfree 86. Now. Finally.

We're talking five days ago, mind. So don't feel so bad :)

Two things of interest:
1, The driver is a result of via and Alan Cox working together.
2, Alan has been using an epia as his main box, and I quote:
"I have two boxes with the relevant hardware. One of them is my desktop box and I've been running the driver as my main desktop for a couple of weeks now."

Seal of approval, if ever I saw one.

Dave

I've built a multimedia box based on one of these sweet motherboard/CPU combos. They can be run without fans (or with a small 40 mm fan) and have integrated 100 Mbps LAN, USB2, Firewire, VGA (+tv out), 6 channel sound and a hardware MPEG decoder. Add a slimline DVD/CD-RW combo and a large external harddrive (external to avoid problems with the small power supply). There is a one PCI expansion slot for the TV card.

I'm running it under Windows, but Linux drivers are available here.

I'm running Gentoo Linux 1.4rc1. Everything is built from scratch with optimizations so it's as fast as can be on both machines. I'm running kernel 2.4.20 on both machines.

I should note that the SCSI performance boost is still huge in Windows, but less profound than in Linux due to the way Windows aligns frequently used files on the disk.

As for your performance issues, try updating the drivers for your chipset (Intel INF and Intel Application Accelerator / VIA Hyperion 4-in-1) to make sure you're getting the most from your motherboard.

Intel Chipset Driver Matrix

VIA Hyperion Downloads

The article attributes poor DVD playback to the lack of hardware decoding, but adds that the vendor promised:

The new "M series" would be coming out soon that did include the decoder and took care of the poor playback.

"M Series" refers to the naming convention of the motherboards. The tested model is a VIA EPIA. The "M Series" are the lastest EPIA motherboards, which add several improvements, including DDR RAM and hardware MPEG-2 decoding.

I've been looking at an EPIA M6000, which, with it's low-power VIA Eden processor, requires no CPU cooling fan. I figured it would be an idea mobo to build a fanless home PC around.

It turns out that the hardware MPEG-2 decoder in the onboard graphics adapter does allow it to play DVDs smoothly at 30 fps. It also makes an excellent platform for an MP3 jukebox. However VIA has not provided Linux drivers for the MPEG-2 decoder.

With a little more driver support from VIA, the EPIA-M series of motherboards could have a lot of virtues -- especially in silent and low-power computing applications.

Tom's Hardware has an informative review of three VIA EPIA mobos -- including one of the "M Series" models.

These forums are an excellent starting point to find out more:

VIA Arena Linux Area
LinITX.com Forum

It really bothers me to see that VIA is claiming to support Linux, when this support is so poor. This review at Linuxathome.net only makes matters worse, since the reviewer tested most features on Windows, and verified Linux support by merely installing RedHat!

I really want to buy one of these boards, but I refuse to do so until VIA either releases decent drivers, or provides documentation for their hardware that would allow the open source community to build our own.

I tried installing Mandrake (sorry, I don't remember which pre-release, but it was recent); SuSE 8.1 from DVD; and Red Hat (Phoebe 8.0.93 prerelease). The only one that had any luck was Phoebe. Mandrake wouldn't install due to crashes; SuSE wouldn't install from DVD -- some form of IDE-DVD data corruption. Got it to install using CD's, but got some random crashes later.

The M9000 uses the CLE266 chipset, which has a new video part. In all 3 distros, you're stuck with the VESA driver -- which meant no acceleration and a far-from-lovely 60Hz refresh rate.

Why did I use cutting-edge distros? Because the board has very 'new' hardware -- firewire ports, USB2, CLE266, audio, etc. The IDE, audio, and various ports worked fine with Phoebe, right down to the Epson C82 inkjet I connected via USB. But the VESA video is just plain awful.

VIA offers binary-only video drivers for older distributions, and has been promising (but not delivering) source for ages -- but only for 2D video functions. They've cited "legal issues" on any support for the hardware MPEG decoder and 3D.

(Pay attention: useful links coming up :-)

The drivers they've released thus far have been for older distributions, mainstream only. Just try Gentoo or something. There are many frustrated users out there right now.

For the curious, here's what I'm using: EPIA-M9000 ($150) in a $28 generic mini-ATX (not ITX) case w/250W power supply; 512MB PC2100 RAM; 120GB Maxtor hard drive; LG combo DVD-ROM/CD-R (16X DVD, 32x10x40x CDR); Intel eepro100 ethernet; external modem and other peripherals. Yes, it currently does firewalling amongst its other duties.

Bottom line: consider this some bleeding-edge, undersupported hardware and proceed accordingly.

I tried installing Mandrake (sorry, I don't remember which pre-release, but it was recent); SuSE 8.1 from DVD; and Red Hat (Phoebe 8.0.93 prerelease). The only one that had any luck was Phoebe. Mandrake wouldn't install due to crashes; SuSE wouldn't install from DVD -- some form of IDE-DVD data corruption. Got it to install using CD's, but got some random crashes later.

The M9000 uses the CLE266 chipset, which has a new video part. In all 3 distros, you're stuck with the VESA driver -- which meant no acceleration and a far-from-lovely 60Hz refresh rate.

Why did I use cutting-edge distros? Because the board has very 'new' hardware -- firewire ports, USB2, CLE266, audio, etc. The IDE, audio, and various ports worked fine with Phoebe, right down to the Epson C82 inkjet I connected via USB. But the VESA video is just plain awful.

VIA offers binary-only video drivers for older distributions, and has been promising (but not delivering) source for ages -- but only for 2D video functions. They've cited "legal issues" on any support for the hardware MPEG decoder and 3D.

(Pay attention: useful links coming up :-)

The drivers they've released thus far have been for older distributions, mainstream only. Just try Gentoo or something. There are many frustrated users out there right now.

For the curious, here's what I'm using: EPIA-M9000 ($150) in a $28 generic mini-ATX (not ITX) case w/250W power supply; 512MB PC2100 RAM; 120GB Maxtor hard drive; LG combo DVD-ROM/CD-R (16X DVD, 32x10x40x CDR); Intel eepro100 ethernet; external modem and other peripherals. Yes, it currently does firewalling amongst its other duties.

Bottom line: consider this some bleeding-edge, undersupported hardware and proceed accordingly.

I tried installing Mandrake (sorry, I don't remember which pre-release, but it was recent); SuSE 8.1 from DVD; and Red Hat (Phoebe 8.0.93 prerelease). The only one that had any luck was Phoebe. Mandrake wouldn't install due to crashes; SuSE wouldn't install from DVD -- some form of IDE-DVD data corruption. Got it to install using CD's, but got some random crashes later.

The M9000 uses the CLE266 chipset, which has a new video part. In all 3 distros, you're stuck with the VESA driver -- which meant no acceleration and a far-from-lovely 60Hz refresh rate.

Why did I use cutting-edge distros? Because the board has very 'new' hardware -- firewire ports, USB2, CLE266, audio, etc. The IDE, audio, and various ports worked fine with Phoebe, right down to the Epson C82 inkjet I connected via USB. But the VESA video is just plain awful.

VIA offers binary-only video drivers for older distributions, and has been promising (but not delivering) source for ages -- but only for 2D video functions. They've cited "legal issues" on any support for the hardware MPEG decoder and 3D.

(Pay attention: useful links coming up :-)

The drivers they've released thus far have been for older distributions, mainstream only. Just try Gentoo or something. There are many frustrated users out there right now.

For the curious, here's what I'm using: EPIA-M9000 ($150) in a $28 generic mini-ATX (not ITX) case w/250W power supply; 512MB PC2100 RAM; 120GB Maxtor hard drive; LG combo DVD-ROM/CD-R (16X DVD, 32x10x40x CDR); Intel eepro100 ethernet; external modem and other peripherals. Yes, it currently does firewalling amongst its other duties.

Bottom line: consider this some bleeding-edge, undersupported hardware and proceed accordingly.

in short
X yes but not with hardware acceleration

And the VT82C686B = VIA133KLE chipset has great support from VIA. There is perhaps 100 PDF documents (about 6 pages each) on VIA technical support, that describe, how to make every advanced feature of the chipeset (Video, ATA133, 100baseT, lm_sensors, IrDA, Cyrix Power Savings modes, USB) to work with RedHat, Mandrake and Suse - last 3 versions of them. It works great! See: Linux Drivers

To be excruciatingly exact, the EPIA you are thinking of is EPIA-M The M stands for "Media" and this iteration of the mini-board includes MPEG-2 decoding onboard (with a dedicated co-processor, no less) and 5.1 audio. There are a few Chinese companies who are actually looking to build EPIA-M based DVD players...the Chinese name for the VIA CPU is "Heart Of China" and there is a certain amount of national pride involved in the EPIA gaining acceptance. VIA might be based in Taiwan but its boards are manufactured on the Mainland.

One drawback, if you look at it one way, is that the EPIA-M chipset is set up for DDR RAM, not the less expensive SDRAM that previous Eden Platform systems used. However, if you look at that another way, it means a faster bus speed and a little better performance. No, it won't turn this puppy into a gaming monster system, but it will make this a friendlier platform for a MAME box, for instance.

VIA is trying to make a play for Linux support for their EPIA platform too...the article I referenced is basically a how-to about Linux on EPIA-M. They haven't been forthcoming to the point of providing all the little details on their stuff to open-source developers, but their binary drivers have been pretty good.

I suspect that this version of the EPIA could handle MythTV, Freevo and the other TiVo-like projects. The same cannot be said about the earlier EPIA motherboard/CPU combos...those are best left to web servers, file servers, firewalls, and other similarly light-duty projects.

To be excruciatingly exact, the EPIA you are thinking of is EPIA-M The M stands for "Media" and this iteration of the mini-board includes MPEG-2 decoding onboard (with a dedicated co-processor, no less) and 5.1 audio. There are a few Chinese companies who are actually looking to build EPIA-M based DVD players...the Chinese name for the VIA CPU is "Heart Of China" and there is a certain amount of national pride involved in the EPIA gaining acceptance. VIA might be based in Taiwan but its boards are manufactured on the Mainland.

One drawback, if you look at it one way, is that the EPIA-M chipset is set up for DDR RAM, not the less expensive SDRAM that previous Eden Platform systems used. However, if you look at that another way, it means a faster bus speed and a little better performance. No, it won't turn this puppy into a gaming monster system, but it will make this a friendlier platform for a MAME box, for instance.

VIA is trying to make a play for Linux support for their EPIA platform too...the article I referenced is basically a how-to about Linux on EPIA-M. They haven't been forthcoming to the point of providing all the little details on their stuff to open-source developers, but their binary drivers have been pretty good.

I suspect that this version of the EPIA could handle MythTV, Freevo and the other TiVo-like projects. The same cannot be said about the earlier EPIA motherboard/CPU combos...those are best left to web servers, file servers, firewalls, and other similarly light-duty projects.

If someone finds a a company distributing modified GPL code as binary-only, what's the best way to report it? Is it o.k. if they just say they'll release source code in the future?

Maybe this is old news, but it's new to me, and I am most grateful slashdot ran that story today. I knew nothing about such a problem, and I just got a new Abit motherboard a couple days ago that I strongly suspect has failing capacitors. I've been trying to figure out the problem in this thread, so this story has been very enlightening to me in my current situation. Now I need to figure out how and where to get my capacitors replaced before they blow up or start leaking.

How about some systemic issues that onyl seem to crop up with windows machines? Try this nVidia loop error here. Ever try to change from an AGP video card to a PCI one or visa versa in 2k/XP? I've has BSODs on 2k/XP on several different platforms (HP/Compaq/Dell/IBM/Gateway) for literraly hundereds of different reasons. Our VP/IS won't let the company go XP for this very reason. They have tested it and it didn't pass. 2k with SP3 is the minimum allowed windows operating system.

I agree that 2k is miles ahead of 9x in stability, but I don't think you can easily dissmiss the BSOD.

The most quiet drives, the seagate Barracuda IV atas have a problem in Raid configurations. When used in a Raid configuration, the performance is less than a single drive by itself. Raid is not officially supported by this drive. More here.

The most quiet drives, the seagate Barracuda IV atas have a problem in Raid configurations. When used in a Raid configuration, the performance is less than a single drive by itself. Raid is not officially supported by this drive. More here

VIA's end-user Support site

VIA's Web site

VIA is onto a really good thing with the Eden series motherboards using their CPUs. The upcoming EPIA M-series motherboards are based on VIA's CLE266 chipset, which offers DDR RAM and on-chipset support for offloading DVD display operations from the CPU. If VIA delivers those features, the EPIA M will make an excellent living-room multimedia box.

Sudhian's Small Form Factor Forum is very active, and a good place to watch for more on EPIA hardware.

You said arguably the smallest, and I'm gonna argue.

First things first, the Lex system *is* neat because of the socket 370, but it edges out the Via Eden platform in one dimension by 10mm. Doesn't sound like a lot, unless you're making some really cool custom pc's.

In fact, I've built my own router (running Linux of course) in a 1/10th scale Celica using the VIA. 10mm more in either dimension and it wouldn't have fit. In fact, it looks just like the two projects I just now linked.

The via comes in 500 and 866 mhz flavors, and pulls VERY little power resulting in a low heat motherboard/processor solution. There's so little heat, they don't even put a fan on the processor, which is great when you have your 1/10th scale Celica routing your dsl in your living room where you want to hear other people and/or the tv instead of the computer.

So for those needing those extra mhz, the lex looks like a good solution. But for a Linux gateway/router and a couple other applications, the slower C3's do just fine, but pull less power and have the possibility of going completely fan free (if you can find a fan-free powersupply).

I don't understand why someone just doesn't do this mod themselves.

Their pricing is quite expensive @ $999-1099+

I'd recommend getting a mini ITX form factor motherboard like VIA's eden. (Go check the specs on the motherboards vs. the console boxes because I'm not sure if they'll fit exactly)

So for ~$150 for the motherboard
~$60 for the VIA CPU
~$5-10 for an old NES / Atari system
~Old PC Components

You'd have a pretty decent setup. (Not to mention you'd be saving around $700!)

If you need some motivation look at Project Jellybean:

http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=120

Was it based on a Via Chipset (with a 686B bus?) If it is, then it has what some people call the 686B Bug, which can be easily fixed if you get the newest 4in1 drivers from via.

Based around the MiniITX spec, these integrated-solution PCs have a very small form factor (approx. 20cm x 20cm motherboard), and can be squeezed into whatever case you can find (or make yourself).

See here for more info
And here for some fully assembled product reviews

It is supported on the VIA P4X333 and KT333 chipsets, for example.

It is supported on the VIA P4X333 and KT333 chipsets, for example.

If you're using an athlon board based around the VIA KT133 chipset and you're a happy windows xp user (don't laugh - we do exist), don't expect to use a common webcam like the Logitech Quickcam Express (among many others), because it won't work.

(yes, I know VIA chipsets blow. At least, I do now... *G*)

I agree completely about VIA's stability problems. Out of all the computers I've had based on VIA chipsets (about 4 or so), the only one with a decent amount of stability was the ASUS A7M266. Except for that one oddball stable board, it's been a horror story of:

• random lockups with the GeForce2 (no, it *isn't* that the power supplies are too small when they're all in the 450-550W range! :-)
• data corruption problems with the infamous 686B southbridge
• not being able to run CAS3 memory at 133MHz (on a Duron) (note, maybe I am just stupid, but shouldn't a 512MB CAS3 DIMM behave the same as a 128MB with respect to this?)
• conflicts with the Creative Labs SoundBlaster PCI 512, Live!, *and* Audigy, and finally
• the notorious Windows Driver Upgrade Treadmill (well, at least VIA actually *does something* about their bugs :-)

Personally, I'm terrified of VIA chipsets at this point. I like the AMD 760MP much better. :-)