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 electronics lab.

History

2011 Dec - Been doing PostGIS experiments so I upgraded it. 2010 Jan - I just started this section but I have had this machine online for at least a couple years now.

Hardware

• ASRock E350M1/USB3 AMD E-350 APU (1.6GHz, Dual-Core) AMD A50M Hudson M1 Mini ITX Motherboard $125
• Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop Memory Model KVR1333D3N9K2/8G $35
• OCZ Agility 3 AGT3-25SAT3-60G 2.5" 60GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) $99
• Case: brand name?? need to look it up. Cost about $50 250W power supply
• "Green" WD Caviar 500 GB drive. WDC WD5000AACS-00ZUB0 s/n WD-WCASU2227103

The SSD is very snappy. The green hard drive is only 5400 rpm but it's just fine for this application.

Upgraded in December 2011

Bellman had an Intel Little Falls Atom 230 mini-itx main board + 2GB RAM until Dec 2011. 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.

Video drivers

I have a Hauppage USB - TV interface and I just tried running "tvtime" and discovered that it's not happy with the video drivers in the new set up.

The ASRock card has an onboard AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics chip. Therefore I need to follow these instructions: http://wiki.debian.org

% lspci -v | grep VGA
00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 9802 (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

Flags: bus master, VGA palette snoop, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64

Dang but the aticonfig --initial command fails, unsupported hardware!

Maybe getting the driver from AMD support page will do it but I don't have time right now to deal with this.

See http://www.sensicomm.com/main/linux/acer_5253/index.shtml

Software

Debian 6.0

Media server: it hosts my music collection. I keep the files in MP3 format, having transferred them from my CD's using grip. Music collection

File server: I keep my home directory here and NFS mount it on the desktop machine Raven. 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.

For Python I have Komodo IDE I also have the wxPython stuff loaded. I edit files with emacs23

I use eagle to view and edit schematics and circuit boards.