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Shuttle SS50 Mini-system
Jared writes: "Small Form Factor is taking off, Viahardware
wrote a review on the new Shuttle SS PC. In a case about the size of a shoebox,
you get Pentium 4 support, DDR memory, firewire, tv out etc. Great box for all
kinds of uses like a media box for the living room, file server, gateway, LAN
box. Slashdot posted about the SV24 last fall, and this is the follow up
product. Very cool." We've looked at some other Shuttle systems before.
But actually I like the way it looks. It would have been nice if it included USB 2.0 instead tho...
Do a google search before posting.
a case for my DirecTV Emulator that doesn't look like I raided radioshack! Sweet does it come in black.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
. . . that's pretty cool, but still, give me a huge freaking tower any day. I don't mind carting aroud a behemoth of a case so long as I've got enough room to live in there if need be. :)
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
I've waited for SFF boxes for a long time. Perfect for small desktops (PC X stations :) on the kitchen, living room, bedroom etc...
What's putting me off is that motherboards and cabinets have been non-standard and hard to upgrade. If we can have a new truly small form factor just as standardized as ATX (right, standard non-standard you might say, but still...) it will be a big step ahead for me.
//TheToon
//TheToon
One thing to make sure you don't forget about is the height/length restrictions some of these small systems have for PCI cards. For many people it may not matter since much hardware is already built into the board, but I have seen people be burned when there old Voodoo 3/PCI couldn't fit into the system! Just FYI. Fly
i bought the sv24 recently as a computer for my sons room. it's a nice size, and has all the connections one needs. i had a spare cpu, memory, monitor, etc, so the cost was very minimal. as noted in previous slashdot articles, it is a noisy machine,but not as noisy as my valinux 1U server. i have to run win98 because of his software (reader rabbit, etc). my only problem with the computer is that the 1394 does not work with the web cam. it may be windows, the via pl133 chip set, or the camera.
mostly a good computer. this new one should just as good.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
I use Mandrake 8.1 with Ximian Gnome 1.4 (1 Gig proc., 512 RAM) on my Spacewalker that I built a couple of months ago... that and a nice (and cheap) Samsung LCD display, and I've got a small, fast, reliable and easy-to-use little station for email, web surfing, etc... (not to mention small home server) in the living room that takes up very little space. Given the price of equipment and the GPL software, its a very cheap and fast PC that fits perfectly in an entertainment room.
You can. The SS40 answers your question.
I have some pictures of this system on my website from CeBIT 2002.
http://kruczkowski.mine.nu/cebit_2002.shtml
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
shutleonline
indeed. I too would consider buying one of these for a lan party box if it came with an athlon, and a better graphics chip onboard.
---
I post links to stuff here
Take one of these impressive little boards and couple it with a Nvida nForce chipset? I would pounce on one of these small systems in a heartbeat if the graphics didn't suck ass so bad. I had one about a year ago and just ended up totally disgusted with overall video performance.
I know a lot of people will use them in the living room/small home server. But I would love to be able to get ride of my huge tower sittign next to my desk if I had a good alternative. support for a DVI port would make the deal even better. You have this nice small system.... who wants to use a bulky CRT with something so sleek? To me, using analog LCD panels just isn't a real option either.
Anyhow... jsut my thoughts.
Laptops have been around forever, and since I have yet to open one up, it's a mystery to me how they keep them so cool!
Well, the general consensus is that if you use shiny or transluscent materials, and maybe slap an "i" or "e" on the front of the product's name it becomes cool.
Now you know.
Other useful areas are:
* Hack it to become a car media player with full featured video and dvd player.
- Why: it would fit easily in a car. Fun. Games possible.
- How: embedd small LCD's into the back of the seats.
* Controll device for robots.
- Why: robots are cool. Easy to program. Cheap CPU-power.
- How: simple relay control using the FireWire, USB or serial interfaces.
* Use it for anything you'd like:
- Why: it's a regular computer. Computers aren't tools. Tools are built for a purpose and purpose means you're locked at a target. Hammers are used to hammer nails, kettles; to cook potatos in, computers; to do anything.
Look a monkey!
Man I need some coffee or something. I read that and thought "whoa, when the hell did the Space Shuttle get an Intel processor, let alone a Pentium 4??" =)
/me just being silly.
Aw well,
The FIC Samba SFF P4 kit includes DVI support, an AGP slot, 2 PCMCIA slots and SPDIF audio out.
Have a look.
http://www.fica.com/products/systems/Databook/Samb a/Samba.stm
Anyone else impressed with how well this site is taking on the traffic of slashdot? Usually niche sites like viahardware go down in an instant or slow down to a crawl especially when the review is so graphics intensive. My congrats go out to Viahardware.com's sysadmin, we have have been defeated.
Am I the only one who would rather have a socket 370 version? Or even better, socket A?
I'm not sure about the p4 stuff just yet. (Guess I'll have to stick with the SV24?) And while I'm wishing, how about dual NICs? And a $9.95 price tag? And a...
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
Now just throw it in a lunch-box style case with an integrated LCD (doesn't have to be great quality, I always have the TV out) and a hide-away keyboard and pointing device of some kind and I'm sold.
Smaller system units are great, but if you're gonna go that route you may as well make it a true portable.
Small box under desk, Promiscuous mode net card, Silently watch boss.
Does anyone know where one can purchase these, specifically the SS40. I've been intel free for over 2 years now and I see no sense in stopping now.
Yeah, but a lot of laptops are built with insufficient cooling, so they will overheat if they are kept on for too long.
--
"Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." - They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"
by losing the floppy disk bay. Who uses floppy disks anymore anyway?
.. dunnno why not)
Replace that with a 2x20 LCD screen, though, and maybe you could keep it. (Although Matrix Orbital and Crystal Fontz don't seem to make LCDs for the floppy bay
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Perfect size for a Bewoulf component :)
http://www.ajaygautam.com
Check out the new mini-ITX platform that VIA has put together. Supposed to be fanless and under $100 with processor. If someone doesn't sit down and develop a Linux based set of appliance firmware, then Microsoft will fill yet another market. 3D will be damn cheap soon enough and will become part of these products.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Don't see anything about Macrovision on the TV out.. did I miss that ?
Via has it covered with their new mini-ITX board. Macrovision out on the Svideo...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Does anybody know if there is a driver for the onboard network device on this board? (It's the Realtek 8100). I know that there is a driver in the 2.4. series for a realtek RTL8139. Is this the driver to use on this board???
Personally, I don't mind having a tower. I like throwing in odds-and-ends in my PCI slots, so something like this would never really be my primary rig. However, for the "average" user (or even a secondary living room computer or something) this thing looks great!
It's got everything the one could ask for, with a few more conviniences than even your average desktop. (That being readily-available mic, headphone, USB, and firewire on the front of the box. Nice stuff.) The fact that it's so tiny is also great, as it could be shown off as a table-top piece, or stowed away where nobody could see it. Pair this with a flat-panel and you've got a PC box with (almost) as much appeal as the G4 Cube. (Which, I'll admin, does look a bit cooler...but I'll take what I can get.)
The only handicap I see is the lack of an AGP slot and, thus, very weak gfx performance. *sigh* Oh well. Can't have everything, I guess.
-Jayde
What's a sig?
I get that when I try and access the URL from the story. I would give the sysadmin more kudos if he could manage his includes in a better fashion.
they atart offering them with crappy old Geforce 2 or other video cards that actually have some capabilities instead of the crap that is always in these boxes... The cappuchino knock offs that you can buy for $350.00 and the Cappuo it's self. have the absolute crappiest video card available... It's like these manufacturers go out of their way to try and find super crappy video.
Hell offer Geforce 2,3 or even a 4 chipset in there.. if they did I know of at least 10 people that would buy one in a few seconds for their lan-part machine. (I'm waiting for the "use a laptop" comments... Sorry no laptops exist with good video chipsets.. that rage mobility is pure crap... Worse than an EGA video card.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you want to use a parallel-port based gadget with one of these, you will either need to use one of the PCI slots to get a parallel port, or else use a 1394-to-parallel adapter. Or a USB-to-parallel adapter, if you don't mind the speed hit (USB isn't quite as fast as a parallel port running in 1284 mode).
But all the new stuff is either USB or 1394 anyway, so I doubt that many people will care.
P.S. It has two serial ports! Two serial ports and no parallel. I guess it was just a question of what they could fit in there...
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I respect someone who devotes their life selflessly to helping the poor survive, but I admire someone who devotes their life selflessly to the advancement of humanity.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
They sell the motherboard seperatly at mwave.com
keanmarine.com
the 8100 is basically the same as the 8139, its simply a motherboard version of the 8139. So i think you can just use the 8139 driver in linux.
i nu x24x-8139cp(101).zip
If the kernel driver doesnt work, try the driver posted below, its a direct link to realtek's linux driver
ftp://ftp.realtek.com.tw/lancard/drivers/8139/l
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Re: mini-ITX platform - Looks neat, but the main reason I bought my last low-profile system was for use as a video player. Not sure the VIA C3 chip is suited for that. I tend to prefer Intel CPUs all around as I have experienced better stability, and stability is #1. I would gladly take a speed decrease (as long as I can still play intense media) over a system that crashes often. That is what I like about the SS50. Too bad it uses the SiS chipset :(
Give me Intel or give me death (Blue screen of death, to be exact).
I'll think twice before checking out another shuttle mini system. The SV24 looked good on paper, but the company failed to release decent software support for the video or the audio. Sure, they had some creaky binary only drivers, but if you are trying to develop softwrae on these systems, forget it.
I've got an old Avermedia TV98 (BT848) and Geforce 3 V3800 deluxe (philips chipset) in my dual-athlon system, and there's no incompatibility.
Add an AGP slot so power users can put in their own video, and this system will own MANY LAN parties. Until then, it's just a cute toy.
For those of you looking for a REALLY small system, check out the Nano Module from Nano Systems (a small Swedish start-up).
It's a Pentium 266-class PC in a 5.25"-size package, containing:
It's powered by a small 12V laptop power supply. No fans. It's definitely not for the 3D game boys in the crowd, but for embedded use or a firewall/mail gateway/proxy/whatever it's close to perfect.
It's so small you can put it in one of the 5.25" bays of your computer while developing. It even has a connector so you can power it from the PC power supply.
I bought one a couple of weeks ago, and it's sweet. Here is a picture of the internals.
Sure, if you want to start talking about multiuser systems, you can really eat up the real estate. Hell, ASCI Blue Mountain is over 6,000 processors, and it occupies a whole floor!
But the thing about the SGI system I mentioned is that it's a single-user workstation that just happens to occupy one (or more!) six-foot-high purple racks. For a while, a few months back in 1998, I was lucky enough to have a six-rack, 24-processor system all to myself. "Only" 24 CPUs, but eight InfiniteReality-series graphics pipes. With eight 1920x1200 displays. One mouse and keyboard. All for me. Oooof.
But there are also some tantalizing possibilities that will probably never get exploited. Despite its low stats, this box has roughly the same horsepower as my Linux box. Which has no trouble running KDE, Mozilla, even Kylix. In other words, there's enough computing power here to satisfy 99% of all non-gaming desktop users.
Think of all the folks who share their lives with a big, noisy, cantankerous beige box. Now think of what a smart IS department could do with the Nano. "Hello new hire. I hear you hate fan noise and technicians. Well, here's your computer. No, I won't come install it for you. Just plug it into the keyboard, monitor and network that's already in your cube. You need local storage? Plug this zip drive into the USB port. You can take it home if you want, but you have to provide your own monitor and keyboard. If you need a software upgrade, bring it back and we'll swap in a new flash card. Good bye!"
Yeah, I know. IS people aren't that creative. Oh well!