Hardware for a 2560x1600 X-Terminal (experience report)
Anton Ertl
ago actually), we want to switch from our current generation of
Igel-based X-Terminals with 1920x1200 monitors
<http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/igel2.html> to new hardware
that supports 2560x1600.
Our requirements are:
* fanless
* supports 2560x1600 under Linux
Would-be-nice: free drivers and LTSP support.
The fanless requirement pretty much restricts the CPUs to Atom and VIA
C3/C7/Nano on Mini-ITX motherboards (and therefore integrated
graphics). The 2560x1600 requirement eliminates all the Intel
chipsets for the Atom until now, and the VIA solutions; these all only
support single-link DVI (if DVI at all), and thus not more than
1920x1200. So the only hardware that satisfies our requirements AFAIK
are boards based on the Nvidia Ion chipset, and they go with the Atom
CPU.
So we bought a Zotac IONATX-A board (because it comes with its own
fanless power supply), and a nice case for it; that case had its own
fanless ATX power supply, so an IONATX-B or D would also have been ok
for that case.
Today I tested it with the Dell 3008WFP 30" monitor I have at home. I
used a Debian Squeeze (testing) system that I installed on a USB
stick. I also installed the proprietary Nvidia drivers
etc. <http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers> from the unstable
track (version 185.18.36; that should have the best support for new
hardware).
My expectation (from things I read and other experiences) was that the
vesa and nv drivers would not be able to use the full 2560x1600
resolution. What I got was that they did not display at all; nv did
not recongnize the hardware (probably too new), and vesa missed
/dev/fb0 (not sure why the latter happened, but since I did not expect
the vesa driver to meet the requirements, I did not care much).
Then I configured the proprietary Nvidia driver with nvidia-xconfig
(which generates a /etc/X11/XF86Config file, not an xorg.conf file),
and started X, and it worked nicely, with the full 2560x1600
resolution. Just for fun I also started glxgears and got about
1500fps.
Maybe we would also have been successfull with the nouveau driver, but
I did not test that (it's still experimental in Debian); looking at
<http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/>, it says that it probably does
not work with the Gforce 9400 integrated in the chipset.
So the next step for us is to buy some monitor to go with this box,
and set it up as an X-Terminal. This will take quite a bit of time,
so don't expect an update from me soon.
- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html