Asus Eee Box

[colinjones]

Andrew - how is the bug going with the Atom/Intel chipset?

Jean - did you get the MSI barebone machine? Looks really interesting!

[jeangot]

Colinjones: no, not yet, I was taking some time to fix other things on the system (every week I wait, the price may drop a few dollars :-) then I saw Andrew's last post and I'll probably hold off until he confirms that it doesn't freeze anymore. The MSI has essentially the same processor and video chipset, so I'm assuming that one would freeze as well...

Jean

[totallymaxed]

Colinjones: no, not yet, I was taking some time to fix other things on the system (every week I wait, the price may drop a few dollars :-) then I saw Andrew's last post and I'll probably hold off until he confirms that it doesn't freeze anymore. The MSI has essentially the same processor and video chipset, so I'm assuming that one would freeze as well...

Jean

Hmmm... we have another i945/GMA950 based motherboard (Celeron 1.8Ghz) and this works fine at 720p over DVI. Which is interesting!

We should get our Eee PC in the next 10 days or so. It does have a DVI port on reflection so 720p setup will be somewhat different to the Intel i945GCLF board over VGA. ASUS clearly have done a custom i945 based motherboard for the Eee PC. Anyway I'll report back here once we have tested a real unit ;-)

Andrew

[skeptic]

They also have a new barebone from MSI based on the Atom chip for $139:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856167032

Difference to the eee seems to be no DVI (just VGA, which totallymaxed said he can run 720p out of), and no wireless (which we don't need anyway). I'll probably order one of these in a week or two.

Jean

That looks almost perfect for my use!  It would be nice if it had DVI/HDMI output and spdif, but with VGA supporting at least 720p and 6-jack output I can deal with it.  As soon as someone can confirm it working and stable I'll probably order it!  Who knows, by the time the LMCE issues are worked out they may have other sub-$200 options that are more HTPC friendly.

[colinjones]

I hope someone can confirm if the MSI box works soon. It is only available to me if I order it in the US and then import it myself (NewEgg and all those others won't even consider sending stuff overseas) And I have a colleague heading over to Sydney from SF in a couple of weeks time who said he would stuff it in his bag for me!

If anybody is getting one, please post if you have any probs!

[marrandy]

Well, I just received my eee Box and it doesn't work at all.  The HD light flashes once and then nothing.  Tried 2 monitors with DVI & VGA and 1 with just VGA.  No signal is reported by all 3 monitors and I now have a RMA - bummer.

[colinjones]

OK, couldnt wait any longer - so I ordered the MSI WIND PC, my friend arrives from San Francisco in Sydney on Sunday with it in his hand luggage! If it doesn't work, I'll eBay it (and I might just let you all know )

[totallymaxed]

I hope someone can confirm if the MSI box works soon. It is only available to me if I order it in the US and then import it myself (NewEgg and all those others won't even consider sending stuff overseas) And I have a colleague heading over to Sydney from SF in a couple of weeks time who said he would stuff it in his bag for me!

If anybody is getting one, please post if you have any probs!

We received our test unit today... so I will report back here later. One thing is for sure the RTL8169 NIC chip will need its driver added. The unit itself is really of top quality all the way through... great packaging, great quality feel to the unit and very quiet in operation (almost silent).

All the best

Andrew

PS The Eee Box ships with XP installed and with XpressGate Linux accessible from the boot screen.

[totallymaxed]

Andrew,

 Did you see this post.

 http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=6149.0

 Can you also let us know how you get by with the wireless lan active while you are installing. I saw no place in the bios to disable this while I was working on it at the store. I hope it is as simple as not connecting the antenna. I see this as a problem as if you have a wireless router as I do, It will try and connect to the external lan on the wireless router and I am hoping that the wired connection take priority.

 Dave

Yes I have seen that thread... just posted a reply there in fact.

Well as far as I know there are no drivers for the onboard 802.11N NIC in the boot image so this should not be a problem... but if it is its pretty easy to fix.

We have the Eee Box pxe booting now and I will put together some details on fixing the NIC issue hopefully later and update the Wiki page here then http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Unrecognized_NIC

All the best

Andrew

[colinjones]

I hope someone can confirm if the MSI box works soon. It is only available to me if I order it in the US and then import it myself (NewEgg and all those others won't even consider sending stuff overseas) And I have a colleague heading over to Sydney from SF in a couple of weeks time who said he would stuff it in his bag for me!

If anybody is getting one, please post if you have any probs!

We received our test unit today... so I will report back here later. One thing is for sure the RTL8169 NIC chip will need its driver added. The unit itself is really of top quality all the way through... great packaging, great quality feel to the unit and very quiet in operation (almost silent).

All the best

Andrew

PS The Eee Box ships with XP installed and with XpressGate Linux accessible from the boot screen.

Sorry Andrew, thought you were only looking at the Asus EEE! Would be very interested in your progress... as I will be following in 2 days time anything you find and post will be of great interest to me, at least! When you say the NIC driver will need to be added, for a PXE boot, at what point is it likely to loose connectivity? Just wondering what opportunity I will have to get the new driver in...

Col

[colinjones]

Incredibly frustrating! My friend arrived with the MSI Wind PC from the States. Plugged it in, lights up, fan starts - no video, not even POST/BIOS, absolutely nothing! Tried with and without HDD, RAM (which is SO-DDR2 RAM btw, didn't notice that and got normal desktop DDR2 RAM for it by accident), and 2 different monitors - both see that they are connected to something (ie the Check Cable goes away) but they stay in power save mode and can't be coaxed out...

Damn! Have to send it all the way back to the US now to get it swapped and that means at least another 3 weeks before I get it back again.

Andrew - if you get any results on this box could you post them as soon as you can so I know whether to aim for a replacement or refund???

[totallymaxed]

Incredibly frustrating! My friend arrived with the MSI Wind PC from the States. Plugged it in, lights up, fan starts - no video, not even POST/BIOS, absolutely nothing! Tried with and without HDD, RAM (which is SO-DDR2 RAM btw, didn't notice that and got normal desktop DDR2 RAM for it by accident), and 2 different monitors - both see that they are connected to something (ie the Check Cable goes away) but they stay in power save mode and can't be coaxed out...

Damn! Have to send it all the way back to the US now to get it swapped and that means at least another 3 weeks before I get it back again.

Andrew - if you get any results on this box could you post them as soon as you can so I know whether to aim for a replacement or refund???

Hi Colin,

What a pain!... sorry to hear you've got dead unit.

Well our testing with the ATOM Eee Box is going excellently. We have it booting fine after fixing the the NIC driver issue reported earlier (fix for this we have posted here;  http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168). Our tests at 720p went well using UI2 + Overlay and yesterday we also tested successfully at 1080p  using UI2 + overlay. Performance was excellent in both cases. Very impressive in fact!

The only area where we are having a small problem is that the Eee Box will so far only successfully output audio using the SPDIF out on its mulit-port jack at the rear (this is a clever mini-jack socket that works with a normal mini-jack but will also convert into an Optical SPDIF out using a tiny little adapter provided by ASUS...it sends the optical signal out of the centre of the socket!). As far as plain 'old' stereo goes its a no-go so far... but we now suspect this may be a hardware problem on our unit, which is a 'loaner' unit from ASUS, as stereo out is not working inside XP or MagicGate either.

Anyway all in all we like this machine a lot!!!

All the best

Andrew

[colinjones]

Andrew - weren't you saying that you were testing the MSI Wind PC unit as well, a few posts further up? This is the one I got - also based on the Atom 1.6/945/ICT7 chipsets, but using the RTL8111C NIC chip....

[maverick0815]

I'm seriously considering getting an EEE Box and wanted to connect it to my TV. However I'm a bit confused, because totallymaxed said it handled 1080p very well, while almost anywhere on the net I heard FullHD is too much to handle for the box so far. Though I don't have BlueRays right now, doesn't mean I won't have it in a while and I'd like to be able to watch FullHD on my TV. So I'd really be curious how much performance I could expect from the box with LMCE.