Nick Rout wrote: >On Wed, 13 Apr 2005 18:02:40 -0400 >Lucien D. wrote: > > > >>Little update on what I said about the VIA mini-itx boards. Been >>looking at them a little. Thie via EPIA SP, one of their newest >>boards has a graphic processor with integrated MPEG-2 decoder and >>MPEG-4 accelerator, not 100% sure what that is. >>http://www.viaembedded.com/product/epia_sp_spec.jsp?motherboardId=261 >> >>It looks pretty sweet, and apparently they've released some of their >>drivers for 2.6 as open source. >>http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050412PR204.html >> >> > >That is good news, but what is really needed is an open source driver for >the mpeg-2 decoder, and (now) the "mpeg-4 accelerator" - as you say, >whatever that is! > > > >>one drawback is only a single pci slot, so u couldn't have more than >>one tuner. but if u wanted to divide between a backend and frontend >>this would make a great frontend. >> >> > >you can put in a riser and get two pci slots, which are then parallel to the >mainboard and your case can still be slimline. (at least you can on >the m series boards, i assume this one will be the same in that respect. > > > >-- >gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list > > > > from what i heard (an i have been a Mini-Itx Follower for over 5 years now) is that Via had just a few days ago released all their drivers for the Mini-ITX chipsets under open source licenses (including the graphics acceleration) to boost linux support for its boards in the embedded/PVR market.
This means that the Mini-ITX's should soon have very good (if not excellent) open source support, but currently we have to wait for all these opensource drivers to be implemented by the community (they were released only a few days ago, not enough time to gather volunteers to develop/cleanup the code, merge with linux kernel etc...) Here is the news item regarding the drivers: http://www.epiacenter.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=508&mode=&order=0&thold=0 Also note that you can get PCI riser cards which will give you two PCI slots with the mini-itx (there exist ones which even give three slots, but these are rare (and quite pricy) ) And there is in the works an EPIA-specific linux distro (with all the drivers/kernel patches already in there) which is in beta (and i think its based on gentoo, not sure, better check). Its known as /epiOS. /If you have to have support for the hardware now (before the VIA drivers become stable and merged into the general kernel tree) i would suggest to try that distro. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
