Shuttle Inc, the supplier of mainboards and small form factor (SFF) barebone computers, announced that MandrakeSoft’s Linux distribution will be bundled with Shuttles Network Appliance (NA) XPC product line. The commencement of shipping marks the fina lization of this long anticipated deal.The rest of the press release:
“Users are demanding a new computing paradigm,” said David Yu, chairma n, Shuttle. “Bundling Mandrake Linux with our Network Appliance XPC’s delivers reliability and power — the ex act formula today’s savvy users demand.”
“Shuttle’s barebone Network Appliance XPC product line is the perfect platform for delivering and using Linux,” said Regis Wira, technology officer, MandrakeSoft, Inc. “Putting these two best-of-class products together is a natural evolution of the desktop computing. This synergy offers a stunning new level of performance and value.”
Shuttle’s barebone Network Appliance product line includes the SB52G2, SB62G2 and SB75G2 XPC’s, and are highly suitable for use as corporate workstations and entry-level servers. Both of the former models have been tested and certified compatible by MandrakeSoft with the most recent version of their benchmark Linux distribution.
Shuttle also has announced Shuttle’s latest NetworkAppliance X PC, the SB75G2 — the world’s first Intel® 875-based SFF computer — will ship in volume shortly and will feature a soon-to-be released version of MadrakeSoft’s benchmark Linux bundled.
Shuttle is dedicated to driving in novation in order to present its customers with products that offer unmatched performance and value. This comm itment is exemplified by the inclusion of Mandrake Linux in NA XPC retail packaging, as well as the dozens of product quality and performance awards that Shutte’s barebone SFF computer and mainboard product
lines have earned.
On other Linux news today, Knoppix 3.3 and Slackware Live CD were released while Distrowatch reviews Bonzai Linux.
Shuttle will ship Mandrake Linux 9.1/9.2 bundled with several XPC barebone machines: SB52G2, SB62G2, SB75G2 and then SB75G2 (with i875 chipset), osnews learned.
Will tehy ship 9.1 or 9.2, I know you said 9.1/9.2, but do you eman taht tehy will ship both continuasly or they will only ship 91 until 9.2 is out.
I don’t know, MdkSoft was not clear about this in their email. I suspect they will switch to 9.2 when it is available.
What exactly are these? From reading the company’s site it appears to just be a shuttle pc… what exactly is the Network Appliance element here? Is it simply that the machine is intended to be used on the internet?
And also, it is ‘bundled’ with mandrake.. Is it actually going to be booting into mandrake preinstalled or what?
These are very small compact PC’s that can be carried around. I know alot of gamers who take these cases/machines and load them up and rig them for lan and competive play. They are light enough to carry in one hand and thus are not a pain to lug around. Of course the benifit is that you can get the full power of a PC with none of it’s bulky-ness. The draw back is that you don’t get a lot of ports to play with and you need to have a lot of stuff built onto the board to make room for items that you want to drop in like let’s say a ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro card, etc.
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/mdkads.php3
“A controversy has erupted today in the Linux community about the upcoming Mandrake Linux 9.2 and advertizing. Although the overall reaction from the community is mostly positive, a few people don’t seem to be happy about having advertizing in Mandrake 9.2.
We’d like to explain briefly why we have done this and why you shouldn’t worry.
0) There won’t be any ad in the screensavers in Mandrake 9.2
There will be one paid-ad in the installation procedure, and a few paid-links in bookmarks.
1) Ads are selected and won’t be intrusive.
Our advertizing plan is only offered to MandrakeSoft partners – we select only ads that make sense as complementary Linux solutions. Additionally, ads won’t be intrusive (no pop-up windows) and can be removed easily.
2) There have been ads in Mandrake Linux for years.
Maybe you didn’t notice it, but in the installation procedure and in browser’s bookmarks, there have been many links to Mandrake products, the GNU project, many Open Source projects and so on. In Mandrake 9.1 there was the first “commercial” link to a technical book content provider. Nobody was annoyed, we didn’t get any feedback about that.
3) Free Software and business model.
As we are firmly committed to Open Source/Free Software, we want to keep on exploring business models that are compatible with this spirit. “
Slight typo in the first paragraph, there’s a space in ‘finalization’.
Ah! Vendor support. Good signs.
These little XPC’s are great… a relative bought one a few months ago, and it’s fantastic. Small, cute, powerful, and not too noisy, although with the heat output of processors these days… :-
I’m glad to see some nice machines with Mandrake, since it’s a pretty nice distro.
I’m here at Computex in Taipei now……I’ll drop by Shuttle’s booth and try to get some more info.
Theses things would be even nicer with a PPC board.
A Low comsumption and Heat dissipation board running Suse PPC.
Kinda dreaming here arent’I?
Phil
Anyone know what the audio quality is on the built in chipset? I’ve been looking for a small form factor system to run either Freevo or MythTV…
Eugenia,
Any chance Shuttle will send you a demo unit so we could get a review of how well Mandrake works with the hardware?
There’s an article on ExtremeTech about onboard audio chips.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1167232,00.asp
Enjoy!
I bought a SS51G Xpc back in February (2003). I stuck a 1.7 GHz Celeron and 512 MB RAM in it, along with an ATI Raedon 7500. At first I ran Mandrake (9.0) on it, and it was very nice, then I migrated to Debian unstable, which it still runs, and quite nicely BTW.
I’d definately buy another Shuttle bare-bones kit. They are nice looking, small, and relatively quiet. Good job!
a little off topic – but I think anybody who grows up in modern culture is so used to tuning out the incessant advertising that ads don’t even make a dent any more. My mind seems to totally shut them out. I don’t think I’ve brought a product because of an ad since a couple real neat toys when I was a kid.
If Mandrake can make a couple buck from ads that aren’t too “in your face,” I say more power to them. And if ad money helped them put in more functionality – that’s a trade-off I can easily live with.
Avoid the SK41G if you are planning to use it for MythTV. I bought one and added on a PVR-350. MythTV works, but I often get these ring buffer backend stuffed errors with it, and I believe it is a known problem with the VIA based boards.
As far as the 5.1 audio on board; I only use the stereo outs, and if I had a digital surround receiver I’d use the S/PDIF outs instead. I believe you have to pass some parameters to MPlayer to take advantage of the surround features.
As far as the stereo audio goes, it sounds fine, and I don’t get any glitching or anything.
I purchased an SB51G as well back in June. Used a 2.4 Pentium 4, 1 GB RAM, added an NVidia GF 4 and Audigy Gamer soundcard. Cooling doesn’t seem to be a problem so far. Next week I’m putting a handle on it. It is about the size of a lunchbox or a small toaster oven if you haven’t seen one. I plan to dual boot between Win2K and Debian (I haven’t settled down for sure on a Linux distro). Definitely easier when going to my friend’s house for a lan party than the tower I used before.
i think mandrake may be out soon as the ibiblio mirror of 9.1 is missing… redhat is not affected… and ibiblio is usually very good.