Intel’s Next-Generation Atom Mini-ITX Mainboards Have Arrived
Posted on January 14, 2010 by Kristina
Filed Under General, New Products | 6 Comments
Dual Core D510MO "Mount Olive"
At first glimpse, the Intel D410PT, codenamed “Packton,” is simply unimpressive, plain (yawn). The Intel D510MO, codenamed “Mount Olive,” is like the older sibling who, at the very least, plays on the varsity basketball team, but warms the bench most of the time—no one even knows the kid’s last name. We would pass over these two with glazed eyes, looking for something a little more exciting, like the tall brunette playing center. But, we should know better. Haven’t we heard the old saying, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts”? Well, very true with these motherboards. If we didn’t know for months already what Intel was planning with these boards, we wouldn’t be so excited. I have to say though, our excitement isn’t necessarily about these two particular boards. Just like any other Intel Mini-ITX mainboard, the features are minimal, the life-cycle is short (12~24 months), and the components are not industrial rated. But does Intel really care about that? No. And they shouldn’t. These boards sell themselves. For many applications, customers need little more than a video connection and some other basic I/O. These boards are inexpensive, meet typical computing requirements, and play host to the most important piece here: Intel’s processors. Read more
Virtualization with Xen
Posted on November 25, 2009 by Matthew Gagne
Filed Under Applications, General, Linux | 2 Comments
First Contact
About 6-7 years ago I recall my first brief foray into virtualization; it was done purely out of curiosity. The host system was my college computer, a 1.8 GHz AMD Athlon CPU running Windows XP with maybe a gig of RAM… I thought, “Surely this beast was up to the task, it could run Quake 3 after all!”
After installing VMWare Workstation and getting familiar with the interface, I had installed another Windows XP system… running on my Windows XP system. For some reason at the time, I felt there was something strange about this. While my hardware struggled along, I waited patiently to install a few applications and convince myself that I was indeed working with another separate system.
At that point, I just didn’t get it. Why cripple good hardware to run another operating system? You could run one operating system with good performance, or many at a fraction of the performance (depending on settings and configuration and such, but you get the point). Sure it was a fun gimmick, you could close an instance of Windows with a button click or try to install sketchy programs and viruses in the virtual machine to see how much it could take before it croaked. Though, running a virtual machine as a server in this fashion (full OS running on full OS) somehow seemed like a bad idea… Read more
A Simple Blog With Django
Posted on November 18, 2009 by david
Filed Under Applications, General | 4 Comments
Note: This is based on a presentation I gave here at Logic Supply on 11/14/09, and is meant to be a beginner’s tutorial on using Django to create a simple blog.
What is Django?
Django is a web development framework (set of libraries and tools) for creating websites and web applications.
Why Django?
We use Django here for a number of applications and really love working with it. If you’ve used http://compare.logicsupply.com, that whole application is written in Django. We think Django is a major step forward for quickly and cleanly developing web applications.
Django Introduction
Django’s official website can be found at http://www.djangoproject.com. There you can read through the documentation (it’s really good) and learn how to install/configure Django for your platform.
I’ll be working on an Ubuntu Linux machine on the command line. I’m not going to go over how to install Django since it’s platform dependent. For information on how to install Django, go here. I’ll be using Django 1.0, so that’s the minimum recommended version for this tutorial. I’m also going to have my database already created so I won’t go over that here. You’ll want to look up specific instructions on how to create databases for whatever database system you’re using. For the purposes of this tutorial I’ll be using MySQL.
Waterproof Mini-ITX Case
Posted on November 17, 2009 by Scott
Filed Under General, Product-Related | 2 Comments
The GW-01 is a fanless waterproof Mini-ITX case available at Logic Supply. We have published a video that gives you a detailed view of its features. You can view the technical specifications here. Please contact one of our technical sales reps for more information.
The Little PCIe Card that Could
Posted on November 16, 2009 by Kristina
Filed Under New Products, Product-Related | 14 Comments
Broadcom BCM970012 Hardware Decoder
For all those people who have been disappointed by the Intel Atom platform’s lack of reliable support for high definition video content, the perfect solution has arrived—and it’s not the NVIDIA ION (although it certainly could be; however, for the sake of this article, the NVIDIA ION will not hold the spotlight this time). The Broadcom Hardware Decoder BCM970012 is a PCI Express Mini Card that enables support for H.264 video compression and for playback of 1080p high definition multimedia content. This means that Mini-ITX motherboards like the Intel D945GSEJT “Johnstown,” which uses the 1.6 GHz Intel Atom (single core) N270 CPU and embedded 945GSE chipset, can actually drive HD multimedia content while still drawing minimal power. [The TDP of the N270 and 945GSE chipset combination is 11.8 watts and the Broadcom Hardware Decoder has a TDP of ~2 watts. The Intel Atom 330 and NVIDIA ION have a combined TDP of 20 watts.]
keep looking »