Rated: 93.33% (3 votes)
Loading ...Meet the Slug
plingboot
I’ve been playing with PCs for years, my first mod must’ve been taking a hacksaw to one of those original 4.77Mhz IBM PCs with my Dad, ruining a future classic forever no doubt in an attempt to squeeze in a speedy brand new 12Mhz 286 motherboard.
These days I have a big, beige, noisy, slightly overclocked, mostly average E6600 tucked out of the way under the desk, gently warming my feet as I type. On the desk is a growing collection of bits n pieces that have just kind of appeared over the months with no real purpose, or, as you can see from the pic, box.
For this mod I’m going to try and put all that stuff to some use. And find it a sexy box.
My last mod was a small, slient PC. Or it was supposed to be a small, silent PC. It actually turned out to be neither all that small or all that silent - impressively missing all design objectives there. It looked nice though and had pride of place in the living room playing freshly downloaded xvid episodes of ‘Heroes ‘ and, er… ‘America’s Next Top Model’ on the telly.
I’m going to try and go smaller, quieter and lower powered, with this mod, yet maintain the primary function of playing dodgy American TV.
The NSLU2 Slug
I’ve got my hands on a Linksys NSLU2, or a Slug as they’re known. It’s designed to be used as a NAS (Networked Attached Storage) but the Slug’s capable of much more than that.
I’m hard pushed to call this a PC mod. The board is smaller than my sausage fingered hand and there’s none of that audio / video or even a keyboard or mouse to clutter things up and waste valuable space here. Not that we’ll need those extravagant luxuries. Thanks to a Microsoft Xbox update, I can now stream xvid videos directly to my 360 and let that handle the actual displaying.
The Slug’s board, not as long as a sausage fingered hand
As well as lacking in the VGA and audio dept, it doesn’t have much RAM or processing power either really, just 32MB at 133Mhz. Still, a hacksaw wielding younger me would be swooning over such blinding speed.
It does have a network and a load of USB sockets, can be connected up to any big old drive full of mp3s and divxs that I might happen to have knocking around and it can even be overclocked. More importantly, it can be made to run Debian - That’s Ubuntu’s Dad to the uninformed, so we’re in very capable hands here. Anything Ubuntu can do, this little thing should be able to do too, right?… er… maybe, we’ll see.
All in all, the Slug aint no high performance PC, it’s going to struggle just a little to run Crysis, or Minesweeper. In fact it’s not a PC at all really. But it is custom (or will be when I’ve finished with it) and that’s 75% of ‘Custom PC’ covered so I’m running with it.
Next Time : How to install an OS on something with no vga out, keyboard or mouse.
Good luck. (”Next Time”)
The SLUG is cool! I got one at home running rtorrent. Really fun to play with, but needs a harddrive to be really usefull I got a 2GB usb memstick in it now. Had did have bigger plans for it but I dont think its really worth the trouble when you can get one of those Fit-PCs for like $200.
Just googled fit-pc… and I want one!