$200 PC

From: Nick Holland <nick(at)holland-consulting.net>
Date: Mon Feb 17 2003 - 13:57:10 EST

One of my clients purchased one of the $200 computers Walmart is now selling, and as I was itching to find out what was in it, and I thought some of you might be as well, here is a quickie summary of the machine:

Model Number: SYSMAR401
Basic specs:
128M RAM, 800MHz VIA C3, 10G 5400rpm drive (Maxtor) one PCI expansion slot, 52x CDROM no floppy. Loaded with "Lycoris Desktop/LX" -- some variant of Linux.

Main board: VIA EPIA-800 (google for all you could want to know) No floppy interface (!) Board is physically tiny -- it isn't much wider than the SDRAM modules that plug into it...   http://www.viavpsd.com/product/4/9/epia-v-l2.jpg (though there is a small heatsink and fan not shown on this picture)

Comments: Better than expected. Parts are very off-the-shelf, nothing fantastic, nothing screaming "garbage" to me, either. About the only clear "that was a cheap thing to do" was the CDROM and the HD are on the same cable. Somewhat irritating default of trying to do a network boot, and requiring a manual tap of the ESC key to cancel. Going to have to dig through the manual to figure out how to stop that... Oh, manual -- yes, the thing includes the EPIA-800 manual, not just their "this is all we thought you would ever need to know" page...

Machine arrived at customer's home, he plugged it in to see what it did. For one, the mouse was Dead on Arrival, which caused some confusion (and I'm sure a bit of strife when he swiped his daughter's mouse!). The machine comes with a card with the user name ("USER") and password ("USER.123") printed on it, and a "System user password", but no indication that the system user was actually "root". The stickers imply that there is some kind of unique password -- this is, of course, not true...they all seem to ship with the same user/pw according to a quick google search. There was also confusion over the fact that the username and password were very clearly written in all upper case, even though, as you might expect, they had to typed in lower case.

I plugged a two-button mouse into the thing when I got it, and couldn't get the Lycoris desktop in X to be usable (mouse hopped all over the screen). Didn't fight with it too long, but all things considered if you were buying it for Linux, I'd suspect you would want to load a more standard distribution on it. But that's not our purpose. For my purposes, it behaved exactly as desired: got off the disk when I deleted its partitions in OpenBSD's fdisk. 8)

I am happy to report that OpenBSD loaded on the machine well and X configured and installed smoothly, I had no trouble configuring a 1024x768 24 bit display. I did a cvs checkout and test build of a kernel on the system, both ran flawlessly, no UDMA complaints, etc. Audio seemed to work fine for mpg321 and X.

At this point, I realize with horror I said more about its operation in Linux than in OpenBSD, but what more is there to say than, "works just fine, as expected"? 8-)

Hopefully, this satisfies some people's curiosity...

Now, to go earn my living and set the thing up as the client wants it... (which is no where near as much fun as where it is now. 8)

Nick.

OpenBSD 3.3-beta (GENERIC) #124: Sat Feb 15 10:44:34 MST 2003

    deraadt@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC cpu0: VIA C3 Ezra ("CentaurHauls" 686-class) 800 MHz cpu0: FPU,DE,TSC,MSR,MTRR,PGE,MMX,3DNOW
real mem = 125349888 (122412K)
avail mem = 110534656 (107944K)
using 1555 buffers containing 6369280 bytes (6220K) of memory mainbus0 (root)
bios0 at mainbus0: AT/286+(9d) BIOS, date 12/06/02, BIOS32 rev. 0 @ 0xfb380 apm0 at bios0: Power Management spec V1.2 apm0: AC on, battery charge unknown
pcibios0 at bios0: rev. 2.1 @ 0xf0000/0xdcf4

pcibios0: PCI IRQ Routing Table rev. 1.0 @ 0xfdc80/112 (5 entries)
pcibios0: PCI Exclusive IRQs: 5 10 11
pcibios0: no compatible PCI ICU found
pcibios0: Warning, unable to fix up PCI interrupt routing
pcibios0: PCI bus #1 is the last bus

bios0: ROM list: 0xc0000/0xc000 0xcc000/0xa000 pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1 (no bios) pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0 "VIA VT8601 Host-PCI" rev 0x05 ppb0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0 "VIA VT82C601 PCI-AGP" rev 0x00 pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
vga1 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 "Trident CyberBlade i1" rev 0x6a wsdisplay0 at vga1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation) wsdisplay0: screen 1-5 added (80x25, vt100 emulation) pcib0 at pci0 dev 17 function 0 "VIA VT8231 PCI-ISA" rev 0x10 pciide0 at pci0 dev 17 function 1 "VIA VT82C571 IDE" rev 0x06: ATA100, channel 0 configured to compatibility, channel 1 configured to compatibility wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: <Maxtor 2B010H1> wd0: 16-sector PIO, LBA48, 9771MB, 16383 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 20012832 sectors atapiscsi0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 1
scsibus0 at atapiscsi0: 2 targets
cd0 at scsibus0 targ 0 lun 0: <ATAPI, CD-ROM 52XMax, 1.12> SCSI0 5/cdrom removable wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 cd0(pciide0:0:1): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 pciide0: channel 1 disabled (no drives)
uhci0 at pci0 dev 17 function 2 "VIA VT83C572 USB" rev 0x24: irq 5 usb0 at uhci0: USB revision 1.0
uhub0 at usb0
uhub0: vendor 0x0000 UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1 uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered uhci1 at pci0 dev 17 function 3 "VIA VT83C572 USB" rev 0x24: irq 5 usb1 at uhci1: USB revision 1.0
uhub1 at usb1
uhub1: vendor 0x0000 UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1 uhub1: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered vendor "VIA", unknown product 0x8235 (class bridge, subclass miscellaneous, rev 0x10) at pci0 dev 17 function 4 not configured auvia0 at pci0 dev 17 function 5 "VIA VT82C686 AC97 Audio" rev 0x40: irq 10 ac97: codec id 0x56494161
ac97: codec features headphone, 18 bit DAC, 18 bit ADC, KS Waves 3D audio0 at auvia0
vr0 at pci0 dev 18 function 0 "VIA RhineII-2" rev 0x51: irq 11 address 00:40:63:c1:9b:63 ukphy0 at vr0 phy 1: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface ukphy0: OUI 0x004040, model 0x0000, rev. 0 isa0 at pcib0
isadma0 at isa0
pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60/5
pckbd0 at pckbc0 (kbd slot)
pckbc0: using irq 1 for kbd slot
wskbd0 at pckbd0: console keyboard, using wsdisplay0 pms0 at pckbc0 (aux slot)
pckbc0: using irq 12 for aux slot
wsmouse0 at pms0 mux 0
pcppi0 at isa0 port 0x61
midi0 at pcppi0: <PC speaker>
sysbeep0 at pcppi0
lpt0 at isa0 port 0x378/4 irq 7
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0/16: using exception 16 pccom0 at isa0 port 0x3f8/8 irq 4: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo biomask 4020 netmask 4820 ttymask 58a2
pctr: user-level cycle counter enabled
dkcsum: wd0 matched BIOS disk 80
root on wd0a
rootdev=0x0 rrootdev=0x300 rawdev=0x302 Received on Mon Feb 17 14:00:34 2003