Zonbu Affordable Linux Machine

SnyperBob

Active Member
The Zonbu PC comes preloaded with (according to them) $2000 worth of software.

Zonbu PC:

http://www.zonbu.com/device/

You can buy it straight up for $249, or get it for $99 and pay a monthly maintenance fee. At $249 flat out, no more fees, it's not a bad deal. I'm thinking about getting one for my next carputer (solid state). Only problem is they don't have a CD rom drive built in.

The Zonbu is cool because they take the 'work' out of PCs. If you do the monthly fee subscription, they will store your data on their servers, push updates automatically to your machine, and trouble shoot any problems at all on your machine. One of their plans even includes overnight shipment of a new machine if yours craps out.

I know everyone here is into computers and can config their own Zonbu, but you can't beat the plug and play affordability of the Zonbu. Low power consumption too! and nearly silent. Hell, this might be the winner for my wife. It would save me hours and days or work restoring her laptop that she leaves running 24 hours until the hard drive melts itself to death (Dell).
 
Cool, it looks like several of the new $100ish PCs that are coming out now. I'm pretty sure the subscription-model for PCs isn't for me, but I can see it's value, it might be just the thing for my Mother-in-Law.

I think this is the same PC that EwayCo sells straight up for $189.00 (qty 1). It was mentioned in this post.

Good find - it's nice to see more utilitarian PCs emerging. I really don't need or want Core 2 Duos running 10 inch touchscreens. :lol:

Terry
 
Would be a perfect touch screen PC except for the OS which I assume will not support touch screen drivers. (Nor ELK RM, HSTouch, CQC, MainLobby, etc clients.) Could maybe be used for browser based HA interfaces?
 
I really like the idea of these cheap fanless PCs but I don't know how to actually use them for HA. The Linux boxes won't work for most hardware (Elk, Stargate, etc) that requires a windows app for administration. The units from EwayCo say they support XP but with no CD or other media device, so how do you install an OS? And where do you get Windows embedded or whatever the trimmed down version is that works best on these boxes?

It is tempting to think that a $300 fanless PC matched to a $300 eBay touch screen would make a nice cost effective interface but how do you get the fanless PC into a usable state for something like this?

I have also had a lot of trouble trying to run multiple apps on my 3 HA servers but I won't pay the energy costs for any more 24/7 full blown boxes. I would not mind replacing them all with 5 or 6 mini fanless machines each running a dedicated app. I would probably be way better off with power consumption and solve my software conflict issues as well. Just can't quite picture how to get the things configured with XP so I could do this.
 
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No hard drive and no cd-rom, so how do you get an OS onto it? What does it boot to?

The key is "IDE Flash". If you search eBay you'll find a little board that accepts a CF card and plugs into a PC's expansion slot. The CF card ends up looking like just another drive on the PC.

I've never used one myself but I've tinkered with several Internet Appliances (3COM Audrey, Compaq IA-1, Salton ePods, etc). People do use CF cards as hard-drives but I can't vouch for longevity because CF cards have a limited number of write-cycles (check the specs, gang). The count is in the hundreds of thousands but let's not forget how often an OS writes stuff to disk.

My Compaq IA-1 is hacked with moldy-oldy Midori Linux ... specifically designed to run in 32K of RAM. The OS boots from CF and copies itself to a "RAM disk" where it happily writes all it wants without wearing out the CF card. But, that was a special version of Linux specifically designed for the needs of handlhelds and other devices with miniscule storage and memory. Loading XP on a CF card ... well, that's a little different.

Then again CF cards are fairly cheap so you can just replace a worn-out card.
 
I really like the idea of these cheap fanless PCs but I don't know how to actually use them for HA. The Linux boxes won't work for most hardware (Elk, Stargate, etc) that requires a windows app for administration.
I hope to change that with Linux but we'll see I only just got the Elk M1. :p I just have this thing against Windows :rolleyes:
 
...
No hard drive and no cd-rom, so how do you get an OS onto it? What does it boot to?

The key is "IDE Flash". If you search eBay you'll find a little board that accepts a CF card and plugs into a PC's expansion slot. The CF card ends up looking like just another drive on the PC.

I've never used one myself but I've tinkered with several Internet Appliances (3COM Audrey, Compaq IA-1, Salton ePods, etc). People do use CF cards as hard-drives but I can't vouch for longevity because CF cards have a limited number of write-cycles (check the specs, gang). The count is in the hundreds of thousands but let's not forget how often an OS writes stuff to disk.

My Compaq IA-1 is hacked with moldy-oldy Midori Linux ... specifically designed to run in 32K of RAM. The OS boots from CF and copies itself to a "RAM disk" where it happily writes all it wants without wearing out the CF card. But, that was a special version of Linux specifically designed for the needs of handlhelds and other devices with miniscule storage and memory. Loading XP on a CF card ... well, that's a little different.

Then again CF cards are fairly cheap so you can just replace a worn-out card.

I have a nice ARM board running Debian (32M of Ram and a 2Gig Flash card - no swap is being used). I had an old 333Mhz machine with 16M of Ram and 2 NICs as my router for a long while. I had it setup for floppy boot, then net boot and finally CF (32M). It worked great but switched over to the Linksys to lower power usage. Swap is not a must with Linux but you have to be careful not to load a program that want too much memory.
 
I really like the idea of these cheap fanless PCs but I don't know how to actually use them for HA. The Linux boxes won't work for most hardware (Elk, Stargate, etc) that requires a windows app for administration.
I hope to change that with Linux but we'll see I only just got the Elk M1. :p I just have this thing against Windows :rolleyes:

I would be interested in seeing how that goes. I sometimes think I would like to switch to Macs but then I remember the phone system programming utility, the Stargate interface, PowerHome, etc. etc, and I realize that it can never happen as long as I need to maintain all this HA hardware!
 
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