[PLUG] Dell Zino

Galen Seitz galens at seitzassoc.com
Sat Nov 14 05:37:06 UTC 2009


VY wrote:
> Hi:
> 
> Does anyone has any experience running Linux on the new Dell Zino line of
> PCs?
> I want to use it as a media center kind of box.  It seems low
> cost and even has an HDMI out.
> 
> http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/desktops/inspiron-zino-hd/pd.aspx?refid=inspiron-zino-hd&s=dhs&cs=19&ref=dthp

My first concern would be the state of driver support for video 
features.  It seems to be taking forever for ATI and Intel to get this 
stuff nailed down.

I'm considering a motherboard with an Nvidia ION chipset for a MythTV 
front end client.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_ion_linux&num=1

These boards use an Atom processor, but with all the heavy lifting 
offloaded to the Nvidia graphics processor, they have no problem 
handling HD video.  The one downfall that is frequently mentioned is 
flash.  Since there currently is no way to offload flash video to the 
graphics processor, the Atom has to do the rendering.  As you can 
imagine, this does not work very well for anything high-res.

Both Zotac and Asrock make suitable ION motherboards.  Here's one that 
looks promising for my purposes:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813500027&cm_re=zotac_ion-_-13-500-027-_-Product

I can't believe I'm suggesting something that requires a proprietary 
driver, but unfortunately the Nvidia ION is currently the best fit for 
what I want to do.

-- 
Galen Seitz
galens at seitzassoc.com



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