UNIX Administratosphere

Lifehacker has an article on a product called the decTop. It is billed as a Internet-browsing appliance, but is apparently a complete (and upgradable) computer as well. Sounds like the perfect hacker computer.

It does seem to be slowish by modern standards, and if my experience with 128M is any indication, it won’t run the most current distributions. There are some excellent discussions on how to install Ubuntu 6.06 onto it: one from Jonathon Scott and one from Ray over at Librenix. Juan Romero Pardines from the NetBSD Project has put NetBSD onto the decTop. Someone else put AstLinux onto a decTop - and added great pictures of the internals as well.

Over at Docunext there is a great series on the decTop, including pictures of the guts and of the locked drive (apparently no longer locked in current versions). There is also a set of tips on getting Debian to work on the decTop, as well as the author’s experiences in running the decTop on solar power.

The system advertises an ethernet connection, but it is, in fact, an USB-ethernet dongle. This fact combined with the USB-1.1 means that the ethernet connection is very, very slow. Everything hooks into the USB ports, including keyboard and mouse as well as the Ethernet connection. These two facts appear to be some of the worst drawbacks of the device.

There also appears to be no wireless support at all - the Internet browsing devices I’ve seen all use wireless connectivity as their main connection method - so this appears to be more of a desktop device, rather than a portable device. It is fanless, which means near absolute quiet. Who knows, maybe they’d make a good cluster (heh).

I must admit, when I first heard the name, I thought it might be a minature of one of these instead. Silly me.