Here is an excellent OS-related case mod. Ingeniously simple and practical.
Windows XP and Red Hat Linux Hardware Boxes
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Should I build a OS/2 Warp box?
I probably will beat most of you. I have QNX, BeOS, Mandrake, RHL, Solaris, Windows etc etc boxes. But that’s nothing compared to this:
I have retail boxes of Inferno and Plan9. How COOL that would be?
This one of the coolest mods I have seen in a long time, does anyone know if there are plans for a main board spec smaller than mini-itx?
Yes, nano-itx! (no kiddin’) Find more about nano-itx on the same mini-itx website (www.mini-itx.com). Made by VIA as well…
That has to be one of the coolest mods I’ve seen!
Most of these mini-itx board computers are well, less then spiffy as the maker thinks they are. Hats of to this guy, he did something pretty creative in it’s own obviousness, and it looks like a very nice job.
Joe, well, there is always PC104 and such. But thats not for PC use. I don’t think there is to much of a need for smaller then this if your going to make a desktop out of it. Being small is only good when you can have all the features people need and have the top of the line cpus. The via boards are very low power. They are just powerful enough to run most OS’s decently. In time this will become a bigger problem since for faster components in such small space heat will become a problem. Currently about the smallest you can go for a full desktop is a Shuttle XPC.
Now if your planning to do something other then a desktop then these boards have more promise. They are great for when you just need a basic computer and need little grunt under the hood. I don’t think there is much push for much smaller then this at this time. It’s just not to practical, why make a mobo so small if HD and Opticals and so forth are still huge.
Well, looks like they are going smaller. I don’t know what use this will be to many people. Maybe for in car mp3 players and such. I think you sort of have to ask yourself “why do i need this thing this small” I think if one of these boards had a good amount of I/O they could be nice for robots and similar projects.
The specs of the nano-itx board posted on mini-itx.com are
12*12 (cm)
12 cm=4.72 inches
That is impressive. The 1GHz via CPU is slow but it does run very cool. I am sure someone wuill find a use for it, shuttle is probably already working on a bare bones system.
I can think of several uses for a board that small.
Hats off. Clever idea, a bit of tinkering, and it works. Love the way he modified the boot loader to detect the state of the box/switch.
Me, I would have just bought a laptop, but I’m not an artist.
Now I have a picture to paste in my mind whenever people talk about a “linux box” or a “windows box”. So, what OS is contained in an “X-box”? OS X ?? ;-D
I always wanted to do something like that, but I don’t think I have the skills.
After all, they [ms] could sell one of these critters with the computer in it and the OS and still come in under the retail price tag on the box! OUCH that hurts. But hey this idea is more practical than their other DRM ones. You gotta buy a new PC with every new version anyway…It’s a feature!
If you could get the raw parts you could probably build a pretty impressive system in a box if you used laptop hardware all the way. Pentium-M proc and the matching chipset, laptop or 1U rack designed optical drives, that new 7200 rpm 60 gig 2.5″ drive, 2 gig of ram. It certainly wouldn’t be cheap but you could have a pretty powerful system in a tiny package. Of course, if you follow this idea you could make the top of the box flip up and have a screen too, then it’s pretty much a stealth laptop
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http://www.newmobilecomputing.com/story.php?news_id=3572
You know, some software has this front panel that attaches via velcro and folds out to give you screenshots of the system. I wonder if someone could attach a very low profile LCD screen and keyboard to this front panel so that you could literally just plug in the power cord and run the box by itself. I forget whether XP boxes have these panels, but perhaps another OS box does?