|
The HP 800 G1 Core i5 USDT ... is a different duck to the 9020usff, but still based on the intel Q87 chipset, and roughly the same CPU/GPU cores. Like the Dell thin-client, these HP units are customer spec builds, and I suppose YMMV buying these things off ebay and the like. This one has a 135w external power brick, which brings back memories =) It has both mini-pcie & msata sockets (it's not entirely clear what the msata limits are, with mention of intel cache drive support which might be limited to 32gb) The HP bios is not as GUI dressed, but still a bit more usable at the same time...ie; didn't take me too long to find the 3.9ghz turbo widget 8) It's got 10 USB ports...lol ...and a mobile pcie slot for MXM type GPU card (AMD Radeon HD 7650A is cited, but at a guess any MXM 3.0 compliant card's going to work)...VESA mount points in the top cover. At a cost of AU$65, it's pretty good bang for your buck as a general duty desktop machine.
The reason I bought it, was to actually test exactly how the system image deployed on a 'like' machine (basically intel haswell+Q87 constructs)... for real. I always tend to use 'clonezilla' for this purpose (and have done for years), I think mostly from the advent of (u)efi style bios, which rendered the 'dd' command into a no longer sufficient process =) It's still a bit of a muck about to prepare an uefi clonezilla USB stick, so it's actually easier (for the user) to prepare the USB clonezilla stick in the easiest, normal fashion, and anytime after installation user can choose to move to uefi bios booting instead... ie; have the filesystem setup and necessary software as part of the image...
....that process caught me by surprise, as the HP800 booted up flawlessly after the image restore...not a single error. This bodes well...
I started entertaining thoughts of what the 'minimal usage context' might be. By that I mean... the possibility the machine may be used without any network connection... and then being used by someone without any/much computing experience, and then perhaps without any linux exposure at all. This would not be unlike the way it was when the A500 came out ~ you could plug it in, turn it on, insert a floppy disk, and you were good to go =)
There's a snapshot release of the build of everything up to/including Xorg & ice-wm, but no Amiga emulator(s) ~ if you've got an i5/Q87 based thin desktop machine, it'll likely work fine -- read the file EYNBNYE.txt on the github page if you're interested in trying a non package managed armed linux system with all the user comforts of a bedful of nails ..lol ...but I've taken that base-point towards an x86-64 build of amiberry, just to see how that UAE engine is coming along (knowing it's not really angled towards ix86 hardware perse), but at the same time you don't have to go out of your way to compile it (sans libserialport), so it's neither here nor there to have a look at it ... and it's best to know the following is version 1 of a paid presentation..
[ Show youtube player ]
|