Honey, I shrunk the desktop
Every geek needs a large power-hungry supercomputer, right? Wrong.
French company Linutop offers a tiny machine - the Linutop - no bigger than a mid-sized paperback novel. Weighing a mere 250 grams, this machine will make cleaning your desk a breeze. The Linutop is powered by the AMD Geode LX700, and consumes just 5 watts of power - a sure benefit to any taxed power grid. The Linutop has no moving parts and boasts 4 USB 2.0 ports, ethernet, audio in & out, and 250MB of RAM.
Obviously, this machine is not going to replace your VMware server or Blender workhorse, but is ideal for low-end requirements such as industrial controllers, point-of-sale, kiosks, embedded PCs and home automation.
With no hard disk, the Linutop boots Xubuntu from a USB key. Software on the Linutop includes the XFCE desktop, Firefox and Gaim. With a little customisation, you can also run your Linutop with Mandriva, Slackware, DSL and other Linux distributions.
In addition to its small size and silent running, the Linutop is decidedly green - not the colour but the movement towards sustainable development: the Linutop was awarded the TIC21 prize for sustainable innovation. In a world with finite resources, the Linutop may just prove that the bigger-is-better approach is as antiquated as Neanderthal tools - and, at a price of just 280 euros, you won’t need to take out an extra home loan to acquire it.
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4 Responses to “Honey, I shrunk the desktop”
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February 12th, 2008 @ 2:25 am
You say “250 grams” but the web site to which you link says “280 g”.
February 12th, 2008 @ 6:17 am
You’re right. A typo on our part. Thanks for pointing this out.
February 14th, 2008 @ 12:41 pm
This is still more expensive than the Everex gPC offer at Wal Mart in the US, $199 is much, much lower than 280 Euros. In my country 1 Euro make up for US$ 1.44. That means the gPC is almost 138 euros. Is there anything wrong with my argument, because as I see things the conclusion badly disadvantages Linutop ?
And I should note that the gPC includes a full 80GB HDD.
Arguably I do not know how the AMD Geode CPU in Linutop stacks against the VIA C7 processor in the gPC, but I belive that CPU performance is beside the point here.
February 14th, 2008 @ 1:04 pm
Bogdan,
You’re right. US$199 is much cheaper than 280euros. But the Linutop is not really sold as a “cheap PC”. Its small size and low energy consumption make it ideal for certain markets (point of sale etc) and not really as a replacement for a full PC.
I’m not sure that because the Linutop is not the cheapest on the market is a disadvantage.