What is your setup like and why.

[zzm9980]

See for me, I just need various command line tools along with a working web browser. I'm guessing at this point X has caught up and Chrome and Firefox under X work well enough. But for quite a few years in the mid 00s, OS X could give me what I wanted and Linux could not. At this point, I wouldn't want to give up OS X power management and gestures for Linux. Plus, I'm not big on desktop customization

But you emphasized on GUI. What the web browsers and command line stuff have to do with the GUI?

Maybe I should have said GUI apps, sorry. e.g., I want to have a nice experience browsing the web, with a uniform UI between the other GUI apps I use. When I regularly used Linux, all of the apps had different widget sets (maybe still do?), different shortcut sets, and you couldn't even always copy and paste between them.

[nakatago]

See for me, I just need various command line tools along with a working web browser. I'm guessing at this point X has caught up and Chrome and Firefox under X work well enough. But for quite a few years in the mid 00s, OS X could give me what I wanted and Linux could not. At this point, I wouldn't want to give up OS X power management and gestures for Linux. Plus, I'm not big on desktop customization

But you emphasized on GUI. What the web browsers and command line stuff have to do with the GUI?

Maybe I should have said GUI apps, sorry. e.g., I want to have a nice experience browsing the web, with a uniform UI between the other GUI apps I use. When I regularly used Linux, all of the apps had different widget sets (maybe still do?), different shortcut sets, and you couldn't even always copy and paste between them.

Never experienced this from Ubuntu+Unity, Ubuntu+Gnome( <= 2), Slackware+KDE and Slackware+XFCE. Haven't tried Cinnamon. Gnome 3 was annoying.

[x9200]

D2500CCE looks good but ... do you know anything ITX similarly priced that has this (at least):

2x Gbit LAN
1x pci (16)
4x SATA
buil-in fanless CPU with TPD preferably equal or below 10W
RAM of desktop size?

And where can I get it locally for such price?

[x9200]

Maybe I should have said GUI apps, sorry. e.g., I want to have a nice experience browsing the web, with a uniform UI between the other GUI apps I use. When I regularly used Linux, all of the apps had different widget sets (maybe still do?), different shortcut sets, and you couldn't even always copy and paste between them.

Never experienced this from Ubuntu+Unity, Ubuntu+Gnome( <= 2), Slackware+KDE and Slackware+XFCE. Haven't tried Cinnamon. Gnome 3 was annoying.

It used to be like Zmm said and still can be to some extent but the later will depend on your/authors choice. I believe in general all become more uniform around the time first gnome/kde desktop appeared so probably around 2000. Now its long gone and if you don't use a specific application that is built over a different type of windows interface (or whatever it is called) everything is uniform and follows the chosen theme. I am talking about GTK/Qt toolkits (etc). I believe at the time they had been intensively developed they had some competition (i.e. from Motif) and it was authors decision to use this or that.



And if somebody wants the application still can have a different set of widgets but probably for the sake of uniformity it is now less common.

But this is where I see the beauty of linux distributions that this is all up to me to chose. Low-end servers I typically built have no gnome/unity/whatever full gadgetary blown GUI but minimalistic based on i.e. fvwm (looks Motif-like) far less demanding for memory and with superior speed.

[RimBlock]

D2500CCE looks good but ... do you know anything ITX similarly priced that has this (at least):

2x Gbit LAN
1x pci (16)
4x SATA
buil-in fanless CPU with TPD preferably equal or below 10W
RAM of desktop size?

And where can I get it locally for such price?

No .

Current Atom boards use the NM10 chipset which is limited to 4 PCIe lanes and dual SATA.

Closest you will get is a S1200KP (dual lan, PCIe x16, 4 SATA) but it doesn't have a built in CPU. You could use a G620 (65W) or E3-1220L v2 (17W) and pair it with a Supermicro 1U heatsink . Another option would be the Supermicro X9SPV-F -3217UE which is 17W, dual lan plus dedicated network port for IPMI (KVMoIP) etc but uses SODIMM. Problem with that one is that it is priced at over S$1k . Yep I told the distributors how crazy that price is but it mirrors pricing in the US so it must be set by Supermicro themselves.

RB

[RimBlock]

Intels NUC products also look interesting....

Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing).

Super small but mobile i3 Ivy Bridge powered.

No pricing from the distributor as of yet.

Update: ETA early next year for Singapore. Estimate under S$500 per unit. The Thunderbolt version will be the more expensive of the two, possibly by S$50 (est.).

RB

[zzm9980]

Never experienced this from Ubuntu+Unity, Ubuntu+Gnome( <= 2), Slackware+KDE and Slackware+XFCE. Haven't tried Cinnamon. Gnome 3 was annoying.

Ubuntu didn't exist, Redhat was still free, and Gentoo was the newest trendy rage back when I finally have up on using Linux on the desktop.

Gnome was viewed as a pipe dream at the time that was buggy as shit, unusable, and never work. All of the cool kids spent hours/days/weeks trying to compile all of the dependencies to use E http://www.enlightenment.org/

[nakatago]

Never experienced this from Ubuntu+Unity, Ubuntu+Gnome( <= 2), Slackware+KDE and Slackware+XFCE. Haven't tried Cinnamon. Gnome 3 was annoying.

Ubuntu didn't exist, Redhat was still free, and Gentoo was the newest trendy rage back when I finally have up on using Linux on the desktop.

Gnome was viewed as a pipe dream at the time that was buggy as shit, unusable, and never work. All of the cool kids spent hours/days/weeks trying to compile all of the dependencies to use E http://www.enlightenment.org/

That's so long ago. FYI, the free Red Hat is now known as Fedora.

[zzm9980]

That's so long ago. FYI, the free Red Hat is now known as Fedora.

I know (Although I prefer CentOS to Fedora)

I'm actually RHCE (Rhel5/6), /flex. I know Linux very well. I just hate using it on the desktop, and rarely use the consumer distros except for Ubuntu in my Backtrack and Silica VMs.

[RimBlock]

That's so long ago. FYI, the free Red Hat is now known as Fedora.

Fedora is the desktop version based on the Redhat code, CentOS is the server version and is known to be used as a testing ground by the RHEL team for features and stability before RHEL release much like OpenVZ is for Parallels virtualisation software.

I started with a pretty early version of Slackware. Had to install via a text interface including having to manually partition storage with fdisk. XFree86 only worked with a handful of video cards and it was not uncommon to have to edit the config files to get it working. It was also pretty much useless for anything apart from running X-Terms. The geek factor was measured by being able to change colours of directories, files etc in directory listings. Having the colours flashing or added headers of ASCII art was a bonus. I also remember having to travel to a neighbouring university to blag PAD access in order to connect to their systems from ours and get internet access via their feed as out Uni didnt have it. Those were the days .

RB

[nakatago]

How quaint.

[RimBlock]

How quaint.

Haha, yeah. Back in the day we had to hop on to Janet if we wanted any fun (Joint Academic NETwork) but it was limited. PAD access gave us Internet BBS access and with UUCP the world was our oyster. What did we do with all that power..... well, lets just say it didn't further our academic education but was quite enlightening at the time. Jpg corruption was a b**** though especially on a 28.8k modem .

Oh just to clarify, Fedora is the Desktop version of RedHat and RHEL ($$$) is the server version. CentOS is a non-affliated free server version based on the free available sources from RHEL (i.e. the Linux bits but not the tool sets and utilities specific to RHEL).

RB

[x9200]

D2500CCE looks good but ... do you know anything ITX similarly priced that has this (at least):

2x Gbit LAN
1x pci (16)
4x SATA
buil-in fanless CPU with TPD preferably equal or below 10W
RAM of desktop size?

And where can I get it locally for such price?

No .

Current Atom boards use the NM10 chipset which is limited to 4 PCIe lanes and dual SATA.

I found not a perfect much but pretty close:
Jetway NC9KDL-2550
http://www.jetwaycomputer.com/NF9D.html

Unfortunately ca 50% more expensive.

[RimBlock]

D2500CCE looks good but ... do you know anything ITX similarly priced that has this (at least):

2x Gbit LAN
1x pci (16)
4x SATA
buil-in fanless CPU with TPD preferably equal or below 10W
RAM of desktop size?

And where can I get it locally for such price?

No .

Current Atom boards use the NM10 chipset which is limited to 4 PCIe lanes and dual SATA.

I found not a perfect much but pretty close:
Jetway NC9KDL-2550
http://www.jetwaycomputer.com/NF9D.html

Unfortunately ca 50% more expensive.

Not bad. They must be running some of the 4x PCIe lanes to a second SATA chipset hence the PCI (not PCIe) slot. They also have an uprated Power VR chipset hence the extra cost. They also use Realtek rather than Intel network chipsets but this may not be a concern depending on the planned use.

Note that the Atom boards (regardless of manufacturer) do not officially support 64bit OSs. The company behind Power VR chipsets are not producing 64bit drivers for the Atoms built in video. Standard VGA drivers work but you loose all the advantages of the video chipset. This is also why the new Atom boards are listed as only being able to take 4GB ram (32bit only able to address that much as standard) when I have confirmation it will run happily with 8GB and probably 16GB.

Just a bit of info... Jetway is distributed by the same person (as in individual) as Zotac products so just be mindful of the comments made previously concerning this.

RB

[x9200]

Note that the Atom boards (regardless of manufacturer) do not officially support 64bit OSs. The company behind Power VR chipsets are not producing 64bit drivers for the Atoms built in video. Standard VGA drivers work but you loose all the advantages of the video chipset. This is also why the new Atom boards are listed as only being able to take 4GB ram (32bit only able to address that much as standard) when I have confirmation it will run happily with 8GB and probably 16GB.

Do you mean the boards are fully 64bit compatible but for the reason no 64bit VGA drivers are available it is marketed as 32bit only and if I insert 8GB of SODIMM modules it is likely going to work?