# gentoo on via c3 proc?

## prolix

i'm debating on building my 3rd gentoo box which will primarily be a mail and webserver. it needs to be small and quiet. i found this today when i was browsing newegg.com

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?description=56-101-440

its pretty slick but its powered by a via c3 processor. its an x86 based chip, but has anyone had any experience with it and linux? i did find some stuff about debian working on it, but just wanted to see if anyone here had messed with these chips. theya re more or less = to a celeron, but use less power (ie: no fan & super quiet). 

the case reminds of me of something from dune.

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## jws

Just got  done with a new MB + C3@1Ghz upgrade + Gentoo 1.4 upgrade.

Works great. Floating point performance (i.e. tuxracer) is kinda crappy.  I have a old Voodoo card so your mileage may vary. Everything else is fine. 

The VIA processor supports MMX and 3DNow , but you need to set your flags as a 586, not a 686 when you build. I used Pentium-MMX myself.

I already had a super-quiet power supply from www.pcpowercooling.com, so by using a low-watt, quiet processor, I am able pack my system with:

1 agp video card

1 pci tv tuner

1 ethernet nic

1 wireless pci nic

1 advansys scsi controller

1 adaptec scsi controller

1 CD-R

1 DDS-2 DAT drive

4 IDE Drives

2 Narrow SCSI Drives

without blowing my power budget for my 275 watt supply- and it barely makes any noise!

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## prolix

cool. i didn't think there would be any issues, but its good to hear its working well for you.

i'm still debating what the final config will be. i'm a bit torn on whether to make a c3 based box for a mailserver or webserver or just make it my linux desktop machine. right now the main gentoo box i run is a dual pII 333 with half a gig of ram and all scsi. its a killer server but way overkill for what it does at the moment. it would make a better desktop machine i think, the c3 would be a nice quiet server.

i found these cases earlier. pretty slick looking

http://www.netbox.co.uk/netbox/html/index.htm

right now they don't just sell the case alone, but their site said that this month they would release a version that is case only so i could build it up how i want.

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## acidreign

I have a c3800 eden board currently routing the packets that will forward this http request.

Admittedly it builds quite slow, but it does the job. It is currently.

C3 800mhz.

128mb ram

80gb hdd.

Sony DVD (dont even know what speed)

rt319too half height network card.

Standard eden hardware.

Services:

DHCP - approximatly 12 machines

DNS   - Setup to cache internally.

APACHE / PHP - serving beta3.no-ip.com

SQUID - Transparent caching.

IPTABLES - keeping the bad guys out

SNORT - Knowing when the bad guys are trying something

AIDE - Protecting my binaries

BPALOGIN - local cable login script

TUNEZ - Web based mp3 playlist,

Xfree86 - Displaying on the system OUT, for mplayer to play dvds'

xmms and lirc for remote controlled Song switching ( 40gb of mp3s.)

This box handled this task quite well. In my recent attempt to try "redhat" because i want to go for my RHCE, redhat was not up to the task, mp3's skipping, dvds unplayable.

Anyone who said that optimising binaries is pointless, really doesn't know what they are talking about. i386 vs gentoo c3 optimisations, trust me, i'm not going to be running redhat on that machine.

I recently tried redhat on this machine, never again.

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## prolix

i agree about redhat's performance being horrible.

i recently loaded it on a p4 1.3ghz and it just sucked. both gnome and kde were slow and barely usable. whereas the same system with gentoo is killer fast and runs flawlessly.

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## JensZ

Via C3 should work, but there are a few issues first older C3 don't support cmov so you've got to compile for i586. Second is newer C3 support SSE and cmov but 3dnow is gone...

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## Malakin

C3 800 doesn't require a fan.

C3 1.0Ghz requires a fan.

The newegg link you posted appears to use a 1.0Ghz cpu since the pictures show it with a fan. Personally I find that rather expensive for a C3/case/mobo, I could buy a boxed Athlon XP1700/case/mobo for less and have probably 4x the performance.

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## acidreign

My c3800 has a fan, although it didnt come attached, it was in the case with the motherboard.

The reason why someone would want one of these little beasties is the micro case. I have mine in a very small black box drawing its power from another very small black box.  

The entire setup is not much bigger than 2 cdroms sitting on top of one 

another. (yes, thats including the DVD ROM.  the PSU is outside the box, with all wires running inside conduit to the system. The PSU is tucked away closer to the powerpoint.

They also have pretty much everything on board, admittely sometimes that can be a downfall, but when you are looking for simplicty of a "slot in this thing" and it works.. replacing these systems will be alot less hassle then installing 5 cards, installing updated drivers, checking the bios, setting  the right hard drive controller (for the third time).

via plan to keep these machines around for a long time, they run at acceptable temperatures and are suitable for use in low airlfow areas (mine shafts) where there can be very limited power.

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## acidreign

My c3800 has a fan, although it didnt come attached, it was in the case with the motherboard.

The reason why someone would want one of these little beasties is the micro case. I have mine in a very small black box drawing its power from another very small black box.  

The entire setup is not much bigger than 2 cdroms sitting on top of one 

another. (yes, thats including the DVD ROM.  the PSU is outside the box, with all wires running inside conduit to the system. The PSU is tucked away closer to the powerpoint.

They also have pretty much everything on board, admittely sometimes that can be a downfall, but when you are looking for simplicty of a "slot in this thing" and it works.. replacing these systems will be alot less hassle then installing 5 cards, installing updated drivers, checking the bios, setting  the right hard drive controller (for the third time).

via plan to keep these machines around for a long time, they run at acceptable temperatures and are suitable for use in low airlfow areas (mine shafts) where there can be very limited power.

Big mining companies use these machines, and often request the same motherboards 9 years down the track.  Why ? they have considerable investments in writing software and documenting these large scale systems and cant afford to have "downtime" when upgrading to the latest "via patches" or the rest of the magic.

I am sure that linux will continue to maintain, and grow, and work on these platforms, and that they are useful in other areas of industry.  But when it comes down to the bite, via have a contract with bigger companies like MIM and BHP to supply this equipment for the next decade,  these low cost, low heat and low power boards are the solution to their needs.

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## prolix

i'm probably not buying that specific config, i just posted it as an example and wanted to know about the c3 chip a bit more. most likely i'll buy teh board/chasis/etc all separate so i can get what i want in terms of features.

basically i'm after a small quiet box i can stick somewhere that takes up little room. right now my server is a full tower all scsi screaming beast. its cool and fast but i have other things i'd like to use it for. the c3's advantage is the formfactor and (on some chips) no fan. this is just going to be a console only server running primarily mail and web for myself and a few other people. 

i had a sun cobalt qube which i loved the size and look of it, but being a geek it was very limiting (based on rh) and sun has crappy support for it and they are VERY slow when it came to releasing updates for security issues. i did screw with the qube a bit and i got redhat running on it and even had a partial gentoo load on it, but it was just a headache so i sold it.  the c3 lets me keep the small form factor and achieve the control i want over the hardware and software i want. yeah, i could go build an amd box for the same or in some cases less $ but i already have 4 other systems that i use for everything else i do, the c3 is being built to perform a specific set of tasks and thats all it will ever do.

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## TheZog

If you're looking for a small quiet box checkout Shuttle's shoebox size systems.

http://us.shuttle.com/product_mini.asp

You should be able to find a price/performance ratio that suits your needs. Some of the top end one's have AGP slots and support P4's.

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## -=Blade=-

prolix - that's most likely the config you'll be using as that system you pointed out is a via eden.

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## Chickpea

Just wanted to pop my head in and add some links (in case you ddnt know) for these mini-itx motherboards.  I really like the cool factor but I dont know when I will build one myself

http://www.mini-itx.com

and a suppliers list

take a look at some of the cool builds people have done.  There are also some links for cases.  I have found the motherboard at a local shop around where I live and they are slick.  I just wonder about performance.

my two cents.

cat

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## dholowiski

My gentoo system is running on the VIA EPIA 5000 board ordered from mini-itx.com. 533mhz cpu is slow but I don't use any GUI. I ordered it from mini-itx.com's store and it cost more, but I got their DC power supply. My box (no case, just sits on a shelf in my stereo cabinet in pieces) makes 0 sound. No cpu fan, no p/s fan, no case fan, laptop HD only makes tiny clicking noises, and only consumes 16 watts of power going full out. And all the embedded stuff works fine- ethernet, sound, TV out- I have no cards plugged into the motherboard. 

Setting the processor to i686 seems to work fine for me, but then I'm having this problem https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=36771&highlight= and I'm wondering if maybe that is why.

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## Chickpea

dholowiski, what do you use this box for?  Everyday stuff?  or as a router/server type thing.  

How do you know it only uses 12 watts of power?  

c

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## dholowiski

it's mostly a server, and a machine that I can SSH into from work to play around with when I get bored. I allso want to use it for playing video and that's what I'm working on right now. Seems to play fine using framebuffer with no dropped frames, but can't use software scaling (full screen). diirectfb scales to full screen but drops frames like crazy. I'm still working on that, going to see what it's like through svgalib. There's no X on this machine.

As for the 12 watts, I have a little power meter thing that I got in the discovery store (don't think they sell it anymore) that lets you plug things into it and will tell you the wattage that it is using, in realtime. It shows 12 watts usually, even though the power supply can supply up to 55. And since it;s a DC/DC power supply, I can run it off any 12 volt battery (think Car).

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## ScubaStreb

I have a very small case with a similiar Mobo and chip.  Mine is an MSI with the PLE 133 chipset, Trident Blade 3d integrated graphics, and ac97 sound. I use the C3 900Mhz. It works great as a small server.  I have mine running as a home mail server and play with Apache on it.  No problems compiling it with Gentoo and performance is great for what I use it for.  I used these flags...

```
CHOST="i586-pc-linux-gnu"

CFLAGS="-march=i586 -m3dnow -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

CXXFLAGS="-march=i586 -m3dnow -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
```

I disabled the case fan since it wasn't needed and the thing runs very quiet and cool.  The hd generates more heat than the CPU.

Good luck.

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## lizardloop

I'm going to be trying to install gentoo onto an Epia 800 soon, will the installation instructions cover getting it optimised for that cpu or do I have to do something special the install instructions dont cover??

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## KeithReuters

I got an Epia 800, and this is how I did it:

I had a 60GB hard drive I used to backup things, I burned everything to CD's and I put it in my workstation.

I wiped it out, created the partitions, chrooted in it, and installed gentoo normally from stage 1, but beware, set the appropriate cflags and chost variables.

Setup grub, remembering that on your new system the hard drive will be hda (hd0,0 under Grub).  So you won't use the current names but the *future* names.

Should work.

Pascal.

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