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I recently helped my roommate shop for a small, personal web server.  We wound up basing it on Intel’s Atom platform, and I was amazed at how cheap it was.  The server (pictured above) came up to almost exactly $200, including shipping, and has a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 512MB of Memory, and an 80GB hard drive.  It runs Ubuntu 8.04 Server Edition.

The motherboard is a Mini-ITX form factor board, so the whole server is pretty small.  It has a low power consumption, with the Atom CPU using only 4W of electricity.  For anyone looking to host their own web page, the Atom is a great way to do it.  So far, the box has handled everything we’ve thrown at it quite nicely.  It’s running a LAMP server to host a few personal sites.

If you’re willing to spend a bit more (close to $300 for the same specs) you can get the server down even smaller by using a slimmer case and laptop components.

With the cost of hardware dropping, I wonder if we’ll see devices like this mass marketed to the general public.  It’s mainly a matter of making a nice interface for it to easily allow setting up a photo or blog site. Imagine a desktop application that would allow a user to type up a blog post, upload photos, etc., then automatically upload that content to the server.

If anyone’s curious, the hardware we bought is here.  The motherboard is currently out of stock, however, as Intel has released a dual core version.  I’ll update the wishlist when Newegg gets the new board in.

I feel like typing something…

My hard drive came in, and is now hooked up and formatted on Komodo, giving me over a terabyte of storage to work with.

I’ve been playing with Chrome, and in fact I’m using it right now.  My overall reaction is very positive, and I’m looking forward to a Linux version.  Chrome makes sense both in the way the code is done and the way the user interface is designed.

I’m also currently in the middle of a project for school, which is to create a commandline shell for Minix.  Currently, my shell can output environment variables… woot.

I got my 8800GT a couple of days ago, and my new Western Digital drive should come in today.  I’ve modified my computers page and also added pages for past and future computers.  For Nehalem, I’m thinking a Core i7 800, 4 or 6GB of DDR3, and an X58 motherboard.

Core i7 comes out in October, I’ll wait and see what that offers.

I’m waiting to hear back on a post I made over at Hardforum, but I think I’m going to pull the trigger on some upgrades pretty soon.  For just $320 (after a $40MIR) I can get 4GB of DDR2-800, a 512MB Geforce 8800GT, and a 1TB WD Hard Drive.

On a completely unrelated note, I just downloaded Advent Rising from Steam.  I used to have it on the original XBox, but I’d been wanting to play through it again.

Intel has announced the branding for their Nehalem processors.  Like many others, I was expecting “Core 3″ but apparently it will be called “Core i7.”  What that’s supposed to mean, I have no idea, but I’m still looking forward to it.

Sometime after I get back to Kentucky, I’m thinking of building a server for running virtual machines using VMware Server 2.0. The idea is to virtualize as many of my machines as possible.  Virtual servers, in particular, benefit from this by being able to be easily moved or cloned.  Rather than having to take a server down for upgrades, you have the  ability to clone the VM, apply the upgrade to the clone, then switch them out, resulting in nearly zero downtime.

In addition to running web and mail servers, I could also virtualize the backends to some other applications, namely Deluge and MythTV, so that the computers they ran on didn’t need to be on 24/7.  MythTV is a little tricky due to the lack of support for PCI passthrough in VMware, but I could of course use USB tuners.  I could also use a virtual machine as my primary desktop, and use a small, low powered, thin client to access it over VNC or SSH.

I recently looked into the hardware I’d want for such a server and came up with the following:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz CPU
• Intel BOXDG31PR Micro ATX Motherboard
• Kingston 4GB (2×2GB) DDR2-800 Memory
• Seagate 1TB SATA2 Hard Drive
• APEX DM-387 Slim Micro ATX Case

The build would be another slim micro ATX build, similar to Cervantes and have a quad-core CPU, 4GB of ram, and a terabyte of storage.  In total, it came to a little under $600 for the entire build (I love how cheap hardware is getting) but I think I’ve decided to hold out for Nehalem before I build it.  With native quad cores and hyper threading, Nehalem should work well for this kind of project.

Earlier today, I was talking with a friend about the differences between the Nvidia Geforce and Quadro lines of video cards.  In reality, there’s very little difference, aside from the drivers.  For example, my Quadro 570M is almost hardware-identical to a Geforce 8600M GT.  Likewise, my friend’s Geforce 8800GT contains the same core and specifications as a Quadro FX 3700.  Such similar hardware, however, had a large price gap.  The FX 3700 is an $800 video card, around four times the price of the 8800GT, meaning you’re essentially paying $600 for the Quadro drivers.  This got me thinking about another piece of software whose real price is often discussed, OS X.  I decided to do a little price up.

I looked at two notebooks, the Apple Macbook Pro and Dell XPS M1530.  Both laptops shared the following specs:

• 15″ WXGA+ LED Backlit Display
• Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
• 2GB DDR2-667
• 256MB Geforce 8600M GT
• 250GB 5400rpm Hard Drive
• Slot-loading DVD Burner
• 802.11n and Bluetooth

The only real difference was that the Macbook came with OS X and the XPS was configured with Vista Ultimate.  The final total was $1644 for the Dell and $2049 for the Apple, making the MBP $405 more expensive.  While the Macbook Pro is often touted as being extremely well engineered and using only the best hardware available, $400 is a bit of a premium, especially when you consider that the price of Vista is included in the Dell.

Cervantes is back online, at least for the time being.  I’m going to take this opportunity to write a few things.  So much has happened since my last post.

Obviously, the main thing is my internship.  I’m now almost three weeks in, and I’m loving every minute of it.  The campus is downright amazing, and the weather in Palo Alto is beautiful.  I’m getting to work exclusively in Linux, and using GTK+.   I’m really starting to like coding in C/C++ now that I’m doing something useful with it.  My first paycheck has come and gone, but on the upside, I’ll have a place to live for the rest of the month.

My Thinkpad T61p has been holding up great, and has handled everything I’ve thrown at it easily.  That said, there’ll soon be available upgrades that I could consider, including 8GB of RAM and a Quad Core 2.5GHz CPU.  But at around $1000 each, I don’t think I’ll be getting either any time soon.  But, I can dream.

In the world of tech, some other goodies have been announced.  One of these is the ASUS Eee PC 901 and 1000, the newest in ASUS’s line of subnotebooks, at 9 and 10 inches, respectively.  The new generation of Eees uses Intel’s new Atom platform, including a CPU clocked at 1.6GHz, a notable improvement over the previous Celeron processor.  The new notebooks are also rated for up to nearly 8 hours of battery life.  A few days after the Eee announcement came the Canonical’s unveiling of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, a custom version of Ubuntu designed for small, Atom based netbooks like the Eee.  I’m really wanting to try it out on an Eee PC 1000.

Also, a few short days ago, Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination after the final two primaries, meaning he’ll be going up John McCain in the fall.  I’m very excited about this, as Obama is the first candidate in my short lifetime that I’ve actually been able to get excited about, and I’m hoping that this campaign will ultimately change the way the political system works in this country.

So, I decided to test out my new laptop’s video card a bit more.

I already knew that the card could handle Quake 4 on it’s default settings at 1920×1200.  For this experiment, I decided to crank things up a bit.  Again, the card is an Nvidia Quadro 570M with 256MB of dedicated graphics memory and another 256MB borrowed from the system memory, for a total of 512MB.

I cranked Quake 4 up to it’s highest settings.  The game warned me that at least 500MB of texture memory was recommended for this setting.  When I started the game, it actually seemed to run OK.  Every once in a while there would be a little jump, but it wasn’t that noticable.  I didn’t play too far into the game, only 5 or 10 minutes, but even in some larger firefights involving multiple enemies, the card held up.  Not bad for a supposed “non-gaming” card.