I went out and bought some no name cheap Atom Board and installed Ubuntu on it. I am mining right now with around 27 Watt on the wall (3 Ztex boards) and I have not yet disabled unused devices (Bluetooth, Wifi, audio, etc) and I am still running the GUI.
The good thing is that the brick power supply has a 12V output, so I can hook this up to my ATX power supply that is powering my FPGA boards. It even seems to have the same socket as Ztex or Icarus boards (2.5 or 2.1mm), so I probably just need to plug it in (want to double check first and I am pressed for time right now).
V-Smart V-Mini VNP 510I (really local China Brand, can't even find a web site and I don't have a CD-ROM drive right now to see what's on the CD). Cost me around $150.
D510 Dual Core 1.66GHz
nVIDIA ION 2
HDMI VGA
802.11 b/g/n
USB Ports USB 2.0 X 5
203 mm (W) x 25 mm (D) x 162 mm (H)
Also bought a SATA2CF Adapter and a 4GB SanDisk CF card. I could have bought a cheapo Kingston SSD instead for $80 or so. Should have probably done that
![Wink](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
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Here is what I did to get Ubuntu up and running (I use a Windows 7 computer usually).
On PC:
1. Download and install free LinuxLive USB Creator:
http://www.linuxliveusb.com/2. Plugin blank USB stick.
3. In LiLi USB Creator:
- Choose USB Stick
- Choose Download and select Ubuntu 11.10 (alternatively you can point it at another distribution or at an ISO file etc)
- Leave persistence on 0MB or change if you know what you are doing (ie you want to run FROM the USB stick, which was not my target here)
- Select options (format USB stick if needed etc)
- Click flashy arrow thing to CREATE.
You now have a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu.
On Atom PC:
Make sure memory and HardDrive is installed. Connect power, monitor, keyboard etc. Go through BIOS and make sure it boots from USB sticks (boot order).
1. Plugin USB stick and switch on Atom board.
2. Wait for Ubuntu to start then select "Install".
3. Choose all your options such as user name, password, and install Ubuntu to your "hard drive" (CF card via SATA2CF in my case).
Since I am using a CF card I am using ext2 (without journaling) and no swap. If you use a real hard drive you can probably use the default. With SSD I am not sure. I don't want to use a hard drive because of the power consumption.
4. Once you are up and running you can do the following to enable SSH and telnet to connect from your Windows PC (so you don't need it connected to monitor, keyboard and mouse all the time). For this to work you may need to disable 'halt on error' in the BIOS, otherwise it will just stop on the boot screen if it can't find a keyboard on boot.
Press Control-Alt-T to open the Terminal.
sudo apt-get install telnetd
And/Or (depending if you want SSH or telnet or both):
sudo apt-get install openssh-server
If you need Java (ie. ZTEX BTCMiner):
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre
If you then fire up your favorite mining software, don't forget to use sudo in front of the command so that you have root privileges.
I used the Desktop version of Ubuntu for now, I didn't get the server version to run since it somehow wanted me to use a CD-ROM/driver when I tried to install it from the USB stick.