EECS from the Trenches

I recently acquired one of the very very nice shuttle small form factor PCs – the Shuttle XPC SG33G5. This is one of their mid-range boxes, and I spec’d it out the following:

Chipset (Standard): Intel G33
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33GHz
RAM: 2x 1Gb OCZ Ram
HDD: Western Digital Raptop WD1500

I installed my (legal) copy of Windows XP on it, and with the driver CD that came with the box I was up and running in less than an hour (fast hard drive!). The little box is responsive, fast, and runs fairly quite. I was very happy with my $600 investment!

This was all about to change when I popped in the current Ubuntu CD… To make a long story short, every kernel, distro version and boot flag I tried failed miserably.

I finally came up with something of a solution. A combination of the latest kernel, the correct boot flags and the correct bios settings are needed. They are as follows:

Distribution: Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 3
Kernel: 2.6.24

BIOS Settings (From http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Inte…d_Q33_Chipsets)
SATA = AHCI Native Mode
AHCI = On
processor = Native Mode

Boot Options:
acpi=off noacpi nolacpi pci=conf1

This got me into the LiveCD fine. I’m still having some issues once I try to run GNOME after my install completed, but at least its a lot further down the line than no kernel at all! I’ll post more as I hack it.

After many a hesitant glance, I finally convinced myself to buy one of the new Asus eeePCs. For those who haven’t been following the news, the eeePC is a small form factor laptop with a 7″ screen, weighing in just under 1kg (about 1.5 pounds). It runs a custom interface on top of Xandros linux, and has all the programs the road warrior expects. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and the like come pre-installed and it is fairly easy to add and linux program to your distribution.

I’ve only had it for about 24 hours, but I’m impressed so far! The build quality is excellent and it feels very sturdy. The keyboard is a bit small, but I’m already getting used to it. Its a pretty amazing little machine!

I’ll post more as I explore this gadget, but for now I’ll recommend it to everyone!

I never really understood what Top Gun was about until I watched this:

I love Quentin Tarantino