Re: El Cheapo Walmart/Everex Box, CentOS5 works fine, F8 has problems

On Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:38:02 -0800, Janaka wrote:

On Dec 7, 3:35 am, General Schvantzkopf <schvantzk...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I've been playing with the $200 Walmart gOS box. gOS is a bastardized
Ubuntu. I don't think gOS helps the Linux cause, my impression was that
it looked pretty amateurish and that it didn't work well. However I
didn't play with it long enough to give it a fair evaluation. The plan
for this box is to use it as a CVS server so it needs to run a stable
OS, I put CentOS5.1 on it for that purpose.

The hardware,

1.5GHz Via C7 processor
512M RAM
80G Seagate drive
DVD ROM/CDRW
Via graphics, (VGA connector only, no DVI)

The performance is fairly decent. The graphics is the weakest point. As
a non-compute intensive server box this system is pretty good choice.
It's very low power, the VIA C7 only consumes 12W, it's quiet, and
without X the RAM isn't a problem. We are going to use it as a CVS
server but it would make a fine print server or firewall machine or any
other similar application. As a desktop it's not bad. I wouldn't want
to use it for that purpose, but it's performance is surprisingly
decent.

Distro issues

I put on two RH distros, CentOS5.1 and Fedora 8. CentOS works fine for
the most part. It misconfigured the display but I was able to fix this
using the Display GUI, I didn't have to edit xorg.conf. Fedora 8 has
more severe X problems. In init 5 mode X won't start. This seems to be
a GDM problem, if I use the startx command from the command line then X
comes up fine and the Gnome Desktop works without any problems. The X
problems prevented my from doing the install using the F8 Live CD, I
had to use the full installer DVD. We will be using this box with
CentOS5.1 in init 3 mode so the X issues aren't show stoppers for us.

Is this off-the-self hardware or did you build it up using parts ?

This is off the shelf. BTW Redhat came up with a fix for the GDM problem
in Fedora. In /etc/gdm/custom.conf add

[daemon]
GdmXserverTimeout=10000

The problem is the slow startup of X.

I've been playing around with it a little more. It's actually a decent
system. If anyone wanted to use this as a desktop system I'd suggest that
they add another DIMM. At 512M it's getting close to the limit with just
Firefox running, but if you were to add another 512M or better yet
another 1G then this would be a very nice desktop system. Newegg is
selling 1G DDR2 modules for less than $20 so for $220 you could have a
box that can run Fedora 8 without any compromises.

.