Bellman

Bellman is a Mini-ITX server / desktop

Bellman functions as a server, but also has an LCD monitor / keyboard / mouse so it can function as a desktop / web browser machine as well. It is on a UPS and lives in my lab. Since it's always on (it's answering my phones for me), it's a handy place to quickly check email or surf the web.

Software

Ubuntu "Intrepid Ibex", the desktop install, with lots of added packages like Asterisk and Apache and MySQL and Samba to give it the full range of server functions.

Phones: Bellman runs Asterisk so it handles my home phones 100% now (no more Packet8 crutch. I reprogrammed by Packet8 DTA and now it is part of the Asterisk system.)

Media server: it hosts my music collection.

File server: I keep my home directory here and NFS mount it on the desktop machine 8track. Bellman also runs Samba so that my laptop can access files on it.

VMWare Workstation: Since it's in my electronics lab, I can run Windows XP on this machine in a virtual machine, so that I can do development work using Microchip's MPLab PIC tools. More and more though the tools available under Ubuntu are making this less necessary.

Wine Actually I am now trying out running MPLab under Wine 1.0.1 instead of using VMWare. More efficient use of resources.

I am running Ubuntu Linux on 8track at the moment (8.10 Intrepid Ibex).

The Atom 230 is a 64 bit processor and it has "hyperthreading" which means it looks like two CPU's to Linux.

At first I tried the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 8.04.1 but since the board has only 2 GB of RAM (the max allowable) there is no advantage to running 64 bit mode. When I installed 8.10 I went back to 32 bit mode.

 0.000000 Initializing CPU#0
16.047896 time.c: Detected 1596.111 MHz processor.
16.900204 Initializing CPU#1
16.977215 Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 3192.22 BogoMIPS (lpj=6384445)
16.977367          Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU  230   @ 1.60GHz stepping 02
16.997432 Brought up 2 CPUs
16.997576 CPU0 attaching sched-domain:
16.997582  domain 0: span 03
16.997585   groups: 01 02
16.997591   domain 1: span 03
16.997594    groups: 03
16.997598 CPU1 attaching sched-domain:
16.997601  domain 0: span 03
16.997603   groups: 02 01
16.997608   domain 1: span 03
16.997611    groups: 03

Multimedia

The Atom board has a standard Intel Northbridge and graphics processor. This is cool because it means finally Ubuntu has all its nifty graphics available to me.

Hardware

• Intel Atom 230 mini-itx main board
• 2 GB of DDR2 RAM
• Case: brand name?? need to look it up. Cost about $50 250W power supply
• "Green" WD Caviar 500 GB drive. It's only 5400 rpm but seems just fine.
• CD RW drive - I am now using this system to RIP my CD collection. Sound Juicer (which comes with Ubuntu) works quite well once you install the libraries to allow it to encode to MP3.

Bellman used to be an Athlon desktop system, I recycled the name because I like it. I no longer use any full-size desktop systems at home.

Mainboard

Intel Atom 230 based Little Falls board.

This board actually has a graphics chip powerful enough to run the latest whizzy Ubuntu Gnome special effects, which I think are lots of fun and quite effective.

It has 2GB of RAM.