<story><title>The mintBox, a Linux Mint computer</title><url>http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2055</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noonespecial</author><text>In the course of my business, I deal with dozens of different embedded PC&apos;s. There&apos;s one thing I wish players in this space would keep in mind: If you want to take a shot at this window of power and performance (the level at which people start thinking &quot;set-top box&quot;) you really have to beat out the $250 netbook I can get at walmart. If my first thought is, &quot;nice form-factor but a netbook/mini-itx/mac-mini solves the problem for the same price&quot;, you pretty much lose just because the others are easier to get.&lt;p&gt;This is what really caught my attention about the Raspberry Pi. It was OpenWRT sized and priced, but promises netbook sized abilities. I just wish I knew how to get a case of them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joezydeco</author><text>I deal with embedded hardware all day long as well.  I don&apos;t need a case of Raspberry Pis.  I need a guarantee &lt;i&gt;that the board will be available for the next five years&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;My customers have products that run for that long, even longer.  I can&apos;t be changing hardware every year because the chip has been end-of-lifed or has become suddenly scarce and the price has quadrupled.  And this happens a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt;.  Even the pico-ITX stuff disappears and reappears constantly, especially when it&apos;s from Asia.</text></comment>
<story><title>The mintBox, a Linux Mint computer</title><url>http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2055</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noonespecial</author><text>In the course of my business, I deal with dozens of different embedded PC&apos;s. There&apos;s one thing I wish players in this space would keep in mind: If you want to take a shot at this window of power and performance (the level at which people start thinking &quot;set-top box&quot;) you really have to beat out the $250 netbook I can get at walmart. If my first thought is, &quot;nice form-factor but a netbook/mini-itx/mac-mini solves the problem for the same price&quot;, you pretty much lose just because the others are easier to get.&lt;p&gt;This is what really caught my attention about the Raspberry Pi. It was OpenWRT sized and priced, but promises netbook sized abilities. I just wish I knew how to get a case of them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drostie</author><text>Yeah, the one big thing that this one has going for it is its noiselessness due to using its case as a heat sink. Torvalds has also talked about how he wants a &quot;whisper-quiet&quot; computing environment; I&apos;m surprised that so few companies treat this as a design target. It&apos;s probably more popular among computers designed to be used as thin clients, which it looks like the mintBox is.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s nice to see how much you can compress into that small package, though.</text></comment>