Out with the old, in with the new

A couple of weeks ago, I tried to install Fedora 10 on my main home server, a 128MB 800MHz VIA box. It was not to be.

At first try, Anaconda OOM-ed while installing the first package. We demanded 256MB for a while, but I always broke the minimums with impunity. Not anymore. Looks like we do not enable the configured swap during the installation in F10. I'm surprised Anaconda was able to compute package dependencies before OOM-ing.

Undaunted, I installed using a laptop and moved the hard drive... Illegal instruction on boot. I forgot that VIA is not really i686 as gcc understands it.

At that point I gave up on retrocomputing and bought an Atom barebones for $140 and a 500GB SATA disk for another $60. Since the Atom thing takes SODIMMs, I dropped a spare 512MB module in it that an upgrade to my daughter's Inspiron 1501 released.

So far, so good. It turned out that TSC is bust in either Fedora 10, MSI Wind PC, or Intel Atom: time jumps all over, so not only NTP cannot work, but masqueraded TCP sessions get randomly dropped. Switching to HPET fixed the problem.

VIA was $208 plus disk, Wind is $140 plus disk. Sounds like a win (especially after inflation). Also, no more i686 issues. There is no PCI, only an internal mini-PCI-Express for WiFi, and a CF connector. The box is very quiet (Actually the VIA had a quiet option, but it was expensive, and a lie due to CPU cooler anyway.).

I expected to see VIA Nano in this role, but it looks like Intel steamrolled its Taiwanese rival with Atom. Oh well, Intel is friendlier to Linux anyway (recent efforts by Harald only scratched the surface, I think — would be happy to be ignorant here).

Update: A 1.5mm screw is required to hold down Mini-PCIe module. That can be major a setback.