Hi Andrew,
I have been using Shuttle boxes for the past 4 years now and love them.
They provide a smaller footprint than a normal tower PC and are very
quiet. I use one at work and three at home (one for a server, one for a
PVR box and a desktop) and you can pretty much put any low-medium end
card in it without any issues. I currently use a XFX video card (NVIDIA)
with dual-head DVI that uses only a heatsink (makes for less sound). At
work I run two 19" Dell's in landscape mode on Fedora.
However, I am pretty sure these boxes don't go over 4G's of memory (I
know mine don't but there are new ones out now, you may want to check
www.shuttle.com). Works without an issue using NVIDIA's drivers
(unfortunately closed source, but easy enough to get going). If you want
to see them in person, I believe Fry's in North County has a better
selection than Mission Valley Fry's.
I hope this may help some.
--Manuel
Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Well, with the current kerfuffle that Homeland Insecurity can snag
your laptop indefinitely for no reason, I need to rearrange how I
handle my computing.
Keeping all of my stuff on a laptop that can get snagged and impounded
just isn't a good idea anymore. The last thing I need is to have to
buy and rebuild my relatively expensive laptop because "Da Gummint"
decided it was in a snit the day I was traveling.
I figure that normal traveling is going to be an Acer Aspire One.
It's already available at Circuit City, and I can just image it to
ground zero before traveling every time and just access everything
remotely from either my servers or from home via opened port. If it
gets grabbed, I'll be annoyed, but it's cheap and won't be my main
machine anyhow.
The more problematic issue is what is going to become my home desktop.
If it's effectively going to be a remote server, it probably needs to
have a bit more oomph than my current laptop.
So, I'm staring at a desktop again. Sigh.
My primary issues are:
1) Quiet -- fan/drive whine drives me nuts
2) Display resolution -- 2560x1600 LCD monitor
3) Memory -- 4GB with the ability to go beyond
So, a Mac Mini is close to what I want, but ...
It's limited to 1920x1200 display and 2GB of RAM. That's *not*
acceptable.
Obviously, I'd like the graphics to have open source drivers, but I
think that the 2560x1600 probably precludes that as none of the Intel
integrated chipsets seem to do that resolution. Sigh.
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
-a
--
KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
