[vox] shuttle mini pc's [was The Mystery of the Dying Laptop]

[Shwaine]

On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Charles McLaughlin wrote:

> Shwaine,
>
> You have a shuttle box?  Once of those cool mini-itx cases?  How is the
> Linux support?  I've been seriously thinking of getting one for quite some
> time.  I'd like to dual boot WinXp and Linux on one of those mini boxes  My
> friend has me hooked on Grand Theft Auto, so I need a gaming PC!  But I'm
> scared to invest in any pc with all of it's components integrated onto the
> motherboard.  Any thoughts?
>

I actually have two, an SV24 and a SN41G2. The former is very well
supported with default Slackware installs. I don't think it's available
anymore unless you find someone that still has some. The later is nForce2
based so that requires fiddling with nVidia's drivers, which I haven't
really bothered to do. It's a relatively new box and I've been busy with
class, so haven't set down to do the nVidia nForce driver bit. It works
fine in command line mode with a Slackware 9.0 install, but I haven't
tried to set up XWindows yet because of the nVidia drivers bit.

Overall, the Linux support of the Shuttle depends on the model. Different
models have different chipsets and integrated features. On the plus side,
many people try Linux on these machines, so there's info out there for
most of the models on how to get it to work under Linux. The Sudhian SFF
forums for Shuttle is a good place to start:

http://forums.sudhian.com/categories.cfm?catid=43&FTVAR_SUBCAT=68&subcatname=SFF%20TECH

I really like mine. The SV24 I use as my testing machine for uni work. I
can just pop it in a backpack (lighter than my laptop too) and hook it up
to my monitor, etc at the labs when I want to bring it in for testing. It
caused quite a stir in the lab the last time I brought it in too :)

The SN41G2 isn't fully set up yet. It does have a few quirks (it's the one
that randomly reboots when playing Civ3) that I think are related to the
chipset or W2k security patches (since my P3 laptop with unpatched W2k can
play Civ3 without crashing). That model does seem to be the most finicky
of the Shuttle line, because of the nForce2 chipset I'm assuming. You have
to be really careful with RAM and processor choices if you use the onboard
graphics (which I am). Many people just put in an AGP graphics card to get
around this, but really, if you're planning to do that, there's another
Shuttle nForce2 model (SN45G) without onboard graphics that would be
better suited.