Recently, I had the need for a small and cheap board, to run a Linux system with my custom application. My requirements for the board were:

• Portable and quiet.
• For my development cycle to be the shortest possible: it should run the distro I’m the most familiar with: Debian GNU/Linux.
• I needed to attach several devices via Ethernet. So at least one Ethernet adapter. More than one would be good, they would obsolete the need for a switch.
• USB port.
• Audio out or additional USB port for USB speakers.

In the short time I had for choosing the board, I’ve considered the following candidates:

Mass market Linux devices

The NSLU2 would be a good candidate, but the small amount of flash was unsuitable for my app and I felt like an additional USB stick to hold the app was just uncool. Linux powered NAS devices would be an option too, but they were not cheap.

Further, one needs to run custom distros like OpenWRT on those devices. Although they are feature rich and support a lot of packages, I’m not so familiar with them, so getting all packages I need for my application would take me more time than a simple apt-get.

Intel D201GLY2

My first candidate was an mini-ITX motherboard with an Intel Celeron on board for around 40 Eur. Equipped with everything you would expect from a PC platform:

• Intel Celeron 1.2 GhZ CPU on board
• 1 x Ethernet
• IDE
• SATA (obsolete for me)
• USB
• audio
• VGA (obsolete for me, reported to not work well with Linux)

Although the CPU is passively cooled, some guys wrote they would recommend a CPU fan or at least a fan in the case, because their CPU got quite hot. RAM for the board was very cheap and I’ve planned to equip it with a 2GB IDE flash drive.

The main problem with the board for me was, that the smallest case I’ve found, the Morex T-3310 was too big for me (230 mm x 205 mm x 90 mm) and more expensive (89 Eur) than all components of the system in sum. The power supply was an external one that looks like a notebook power supply, so not small at all (portability–).

eBOX-2300-H

The next candidate, was a small x86 compatible box, the eBOX-2300-H for around 150 Eur. The size 115 x 115 x 35 mm can’t be beated! It featured:

• 200MhZ vortex86 x86 compatible CPU (300MhZ available, but some problems with the missing FPU unit were reported when running Linux)
• 128MB RAM on board
• 2 x USB
• 1 x Audio (very good)
• 1 x Ethernet
• 1 x VGA (obsolete)
• 1 X IDE for laptop drive (obsolete, but maybe practical for installation)
• CF card slot
• Comes already in case (very cool!)

Although 128 MB RAM was enough for me (I’ve tested my app in a XEN instance with 128MB RAM without swap), if there was the possibility to get more RAM cheaply, I would take if for just the case, you never know.

The main problem with that hardware was that shipping time was 3-4 weeks (too much for me) and the customer service discouraged me to use the 200MhZ variant, because it was discontinued already. And because I’ve read about some problems with the 300MhZ variant with Linux, the ebox was not an option any more.

Alix

Then, I’ve stumbled around a family of x86 compatible boards, the Alices. The board is 152.4 x 152.4 mm (quite good) and features:

• AMD Geode 500 MhZ CPU on board.
• 256 MB RAM on board.
• CF Card slot.
• One of the following set of peripherals.
  • 1C1: 1 X VGA (obsolete), 1 x Audio, 1 x Ethernet, 2 x USB, 1 x RS232, GPIO pins (Wow! but currently obsolete for me)
  • 2C2: 2 x Ethernet, 2 x USB, 1 x RS232
  • 2C3: 3 x Ethernet, 2 x USB, 1 x RS232

The price is 111 Eur for the 2c3 variant and 7.5 Eur for the power supply.

These boards really rock: they fill the gap between the consumer Linux devices like the NSLU2 and mini-ITX PC systems. Imagine all the things one could built using such a device!

There are really cheap cases for those devices available for less than 10E! The 18V power supply is quite small and I really welcome the 3 network interfaces, because they obsolete the need for a small switch for my application (i need to connect exactly 3 devices to the system).

So finally I’ve ordered the Alix 2C3 at a reseller here in Slovakia: SKfree. The order was confirmed at Friday and the next Wednesday, the board arrived. Let’s see how stable it will run!