The last of the critical parts to this project (the mainboard and the RAM) have arrived two days ago. Today I finally got around to post something about it. I'd probably would've gotten them sooner but there was a problem with delivery which caused a small delay.
OK, on to the hardware... If you've never seen an epia board in person, it's hard to appreciate just how small they really are. I knew it was small, I seen the pictures, I cut out a 17x17cm cardboard square to check for clearance, but when it arrived I was still surprised at how small the whole thing was. Pictures don't do it justice; you gotta hold one in your hand to realize how well put together this thing is.
This being said, I'm gonna post a picture anyway...
That's the mainboard, in its bare form before we install the RAM, the drives, the monitor/keyboard/mouse (in my case through a KVM switch), WiFi and finally the power. After all these are connected, we're left with the following mess on the desk:
As you can see, I've temporarily hooked up a CD-ROM drive as well, for install purposes.
I've already played around a bit with the board, installed Ubuntu on it to check if it works correctly, Heavy-G aka the gman set a new standard in performance testing by submitting the board to the arduous "Minesweeper Test" which consists of... OK, you got us... We just played minesweeper a bit because we were too lazy to do anything else...
Anyway, the system boots, Linux runs just fine on it. Glxgears performance ain't exactly stunning at a meager 90 FPS, but that's no issue since I won't be running Quake 4 on this anytime soon.
Everything is set now for the next stage: wiping the drive, installing a minimal Debian system on it, recompile the kernel with only the modules needed and start thinking about what base software to install to support the media platform we're gonna write from scratch. And then me and Heavy-G are gonna have to duke it out in Trackmania Sunrise to see if we're going with his idea of writing the GUI in Python, or with my idea of using C++... At least we're both on the same wavelength when it comes to the toolkit: GTK+ all the way... Interesting days ahead!
