side view showing the AGP video card and the Delta 44 sound card                     top view with the CDRW and HDD tray removed. Note cpu cooler

This system is very small and is almost silent. It can be easily carried under your arm. The case and motherboard are made by Shuttle, model SB75S with a FB75 motherboard. I use a Pentium4 3GHz socket 478 cpu with 800MHz fsb, and the motherboard has an Intel  875P Northbridge and an Intel ICH5R Southbridge chipset. This includes onboard SATA and dual IDE controllers, Broadcom Gigabit LAN, 1394a, and USB2. The onboard sound is a Realtek 18 bit ALC650. I have installed 1024MB of  PC-3200 DDR400 memory with integral heatsinks which is important because of the very limited airflow within this case. The power supply is unusual because it not only has a nearly silent fan, it is power factor controlled so that the efficiency is around 40% better than a standard power supply. A Radeon ATI 7000 AGP video card and a M-audio Delta 44 card are installed. I also installed a Plextor CDRW drive and a Maxtor DiamondMax 60GB SATA hdd capable of 150MB/sec transfer rate. The optional parallel port connector is also installed so that Linrad receivers can be controlled.The operating system is RH Fedora Core 3 linux. I recommend a simple Microsoft PS/2 mouse so there won't be problems setting up svgalib. The cpu is cooled by a heat conducting pipe system connected to a radiator in front of a fan on the rear of the case. The fan's speed is dynamically controlled by the motherboard so there is little noise unless the ambient temperature is high.

In order to successfully compile and run svgalib, I strongly advise keeping the kernel included with Fedora 3 and not upgrading to a later kernel verson. The kernel version that works is 2.6.9-1.667

In addition to successfully running Linrad, I have installed a number of development programs, Foxfire browser, an FTP client and the sound programs Audacity and Realplayer. The sound system drivers are the latest licensed version of OSS. The desktop is Gnome. I use a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 with a LCD monitor.

If you buy all the above components and install all the needed programs and configure correctly, Linrad runs perfectly on this system. The component cost of this system not including the OSS license, the keboard, mouse or monitor will be around $1054 including shipping of each component you will need. Installing and configuring all the software will probably take at least half day if you know linux or unix, and several days if you don't. If you don't have time but you would like to have one of these systems specifically configured and preloaded with Linrad running, then contact me and I might do it for you for a small charge on top of the components cost listed above.   [jpawlan at pawlan dot com]