I believe the short answer to the question of whether the Asus EEE Box is sufficient to run SqueezeCenter is yes, but there are several caveats that I'll get into below (somewhat long).
I own an Asus EEE Box, not the netbook, and it's generally for my wife's use. It's darn cute and quite small (no optical drive). She rarely boots it into WinXP, but instead typically uses the browser in ExpressGate for web-based e-mail and light browsing. And for this it works very well (you can have the browser window open in about 18 seconds). Shortly after unboxing the EEE I thought of using something like it for a SqueezeCenter server. Toward that end I bought an MSI Wind barebones instead of buying another EEE Box. It's somewhat comparable to the EEE Box (Intel Atom N270 running at 1.6 GHz, a similar Intel chipset, gigabit Ethernet, four USB ports, etc.), but it's in a bigger box that can accommodate a full-size optical drive. The MSI Wind is sold as a barebones box, so it's initially cheaper (about 135 USD now instead of about 300 USD for the EEE Box) but you have to add your own memory, hard drive and OS and I put in an optical drive as well. The MSI Wind does have a mini-PCI slot so you can add a wireless card if you want to. I didn't bother because it's going to be connected it to a wired network and I don't use the 802.11 wireless in the EEE Box, either. The MSI Wind is quiet, but not quite as quiet as the EEE Box. There is a fan in the EEE Box, but I don't hear it at all. The MSI Wind has a 60 cm fan on the back which I can hear, but again it's quite quiet. The MSI Wind also allows me to install the OS of my choice, although I could have repartitioned the EEE Box hard drive to do the same. In fact, the 80 GB hard drive in the EEE Box came with two partitions out of the box, C: and D: NTFS partitions. But I've never run SlimServer or SqueezeCenter on anything other than a Linux distribution, with Fedora being my current choice. Right now I'm running SqueezeCenter on a Shuttle small-format PC with a socket 478 2.4 GHz Intel Celeron with Fedora Core 6 and my music on an external drive connected via eSATA. I think the MSI Wind box is the equal, if not the better of my current set up when it comes to performance. An interesting thing about the MSI Wind is it has a CompactFlash slot. Somewhat less interesting about this slot is you have to remove the motherboard to actually install the CompactFlash. Initially I put in a CompactFlash instead of a hard drive and installed Ubuntu 8.04 i386 on it. It ran just fine, but the CompactFlash I used was recognized as a PIO mode drive, so it was somewhat slow to write. After playing with that a bit I added a hard drive, a 40 GB SATA laptop drive I had laying around, and installed Fedora 9 x86-64 (I was reasonably sure the Atom architecture is 64-bit compliant). I later found that by installing Fedora I somehow messed up Ubuntu installation on the CompactFlash and I couldn't boot it anymore (and I never bothered to try and fix it). I installed a SqueezeCenter 7.2 daily in Fedora and it comes up just fine. I set up a mini-network with one wired player and a few MP3s installed on the hard drive and everything worked just fine. The only oddness with this set up is Fedora doesn't boot from start-up every time. It's not unusual to get 2 or 3 kernel panics before it finally boots from a cold start. I don't know if this is related to having the 64-bit version of Fedora 9 installed; I didn't have this problem with the 32-bit version of Ubuntu. I'm not particularly worried about this because once I get Fedora 9 booted it will run for several days with no problems. The up time on my SqueezeCenter boxes is typically measured in months and sometimes exceeds a year; in other words I rarely shut it down. Granted the tests I've done so far are limited, but I plan on making the MSI Wind box my next SqueezeCenter server. I plan on replacing the mechanical hard drive with an SSD, as they continue to drop in price. I'm also awaiting the release of Fedora 10 as that isn't far off (although I may hedge my bets and install the 32-bit version). Lastly, I probably will connect the external drive with the music via USB instead of eSATA. The MSI Wind only has two SATA interfaces and they're expected to be used by the hard and optical drives. I don't expect any problems with the USB interface, but if I do I'll remove the optical drive (primarily there to install the OS) and use that for an eSATA connection to the external drive. Ken -- klgray ------------------------------------------------------------------------ klgray's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1282 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=54591 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
