Lin PC PC Linux OS PC?

[jr223]

Howdy,

I have just a quick quesetion, has anyone purchased a Lin PC from http://www.linpc.us/ ?
These PC's come with PC Linux OS already installed.
I'm thinking of maybe getting one, but would like some expert opinion before I purchase.

Cheers
Jr223

[horusfalcon]

I bought one of the PCLinuxOS "Box" systems for my wife a few years ago when her old machine died.  It has been a rugged, steady performer for all this time, despite several power blinks that shut it down when our UPS battery died and was awaiting replacement.

Hang on a tick and I'll see if I can find my original review... nope, no dice... seems lost in the mists of time.  Let me see now...

Here's basically the same review from my System Configuration Notes folder (with some judicious editing to protect privacy...):

Original Release:  17 Jan 2009
Last Update:       22 Jan 2009

Configuration Notes
New System for user: XXXXXXXXXXXXX

1.0  Background:

[snipped for brevity - mostly personal stuff, anyway]

2.0  Ordering

LinPC.us is a small outfit in South Carolina, ran by a good ole boy named Eric.  I never caught his last name, but our relationship started out as Southern Casual from the git-go, so I kept it that way.

As LinPC's website advertised that they only accepted Paypal, I gave them a call at the number listed on their site, and Eric let me know that, yes, he'd be happy to accept a money order for purchase of a system, but not a credit card.  That suited my purposes, so we discussed what I wanted.  Here's what I ordered:

   LinPC "Box" System:  This uses an MSI K9N6PGM2 mainboard with an AMD Athlon 64x2 5000 CPU, Nvidia MCP61P+ nForce 430
                                     chipset, all in a micro-ATX form factor in a very nice Compucase 6C60BS tower case.

   4 GB of DDR2 RAM
   Lightscribe DVD-RW Drive (a 20X unit)
   Front panel USB and audio ports
   400 Watt Orion HP400DR dual-fan compact power supply

(Note:  I actually didn't spec the part numbers given above, that's just how the package shipped - I obtained the info during the inspection conducted on arrival.)

All this came to $343.00 with an additional $23.00 for shipping & handling, which brought the grand total for the order to $366.00, and that ain't bad.

Eric and I talked about what I'd be using the box for, and about PCLinuxOS (the operating system it came pre-installed with), and just generally shot the breeze for a bit while he totalled up the order.  It's evident from talking to him that he really "gets it" with regard to Linux, and PCLinuxOS, especially.

It's worth noting that the Lightscribe drive was an "extra" that I had to ask for, but he decided not to charge extra for it, and will, instead, be now offering it as standard equipment for this system.  See?  I told you he was a cool guy.

3.0)  Arrival & Inspection:

The package arrived 17 Jan 2009 from US Postal Service.  My money order had arrived on 10 Jan, and the system had shipped 13 Jan 2009.  The intervening three days were for assembly, configuration and burn-in of the system (it was built-to-order, after all), so that's not too surprising.

On arrival, I opened the box to find yet another box inside.  To say the unit was well-protected during shipment is an understatement.  Opening the inner box (the Chipco shipping carton for the Compucase case, I extracted the unit with its two sculpted styrofoam end pieces.  Immediately I was drawn to the masking tape over the top and bottom edges of the front panel, and was somewhat taken aback by this, but
it was still fresh and came off relatively easily - I would have used genuine low-tack painter's tape for this, but, as I said, it came off cleanly and easily enough. It was there to help retain the clear protectant film over the sides of front panel, so that was a nice touch.

Getting all the tape and film off the case, I took a good look at it from the outside.  The unit is predominantly black with highlights of a pleasant matte silver color, and has a rather minimalist front without all the silly looking sculpted plastic of earlier cases.  Fit and finish of the unit was flawless. (I will be looking at HEC Compucase's case line soon in case I get ready to build another box myself down the line.)  There were no scratches or blemishes anywhere on the unit, and no odd debris of any kind in the box.  Chipco is evidently the tier-one vendor from whom the unit was purchased.

Along with the unit itself was a power cord and a bag with a SATA power adapter cable, the motherboard manual, extra screws, some other odds and ends, and two discs:  the Windows driver CD for the mainboard, and the PCLinuxOS MiniME 2008 restore disk.  That Eric takes the time to make a copy of this disk (which is downloadable from his website) shows a level of care most major manufacturers would do well to emulate.

Before powering up any system, I perform at least a perfunctory inspection of the case internals.  In this case, all the cables inside are neatly dressed, and out of the airflow path.  The hard drive, a Seagate 250 GB, 7200 RPM SATA, is nestled in the very bottom 3.5" bay, and connected via a very short SATA cable to the mainboard.  Overall, fit and finish internally was neat, clean, and very well done.  The case is
incredibly roomy inside for its size, and has an 80 mm case fan mounted on the back panel.

The power supply is a fairly nice-looking compact unit rated for 400 W, of the Orion brand also produced by HEC Compucase, and has a decent supply of cables coming out of it to support added drives and such, so expansion of this system is easily do-able. 

(It is worth noting that the mainboard drive interfaces will only support a maximum of four drives, two IDE and two SATA.  Any further expansion will require adding drive controller cards.  The mainboard does, however, support RAID Levels 0 and 1 in hardware, and that's a nice touch.)

The motherboard is a small and well-documented MSI product, so I won't belabor it here other than to say that it provides a decent array of ports, in pretty much the standard arrangement, and will doubtless perform in the manner intended by the manufacturer.  MSI makes good gear, and this, while not one of their more expensive boards, is an excellent fit for what my wife will be using the system for (writing, email, internet surfing, multimedia, and the occasional game.)

The CPU is undoubtedly an AMD OEM unit, as it has an AMD branded cooling fan atop the heat sink, which is a plain square extruded aluminum unit with what looks to be a simple, easy to operate mounting mechanism.  I did not remove it - simply checked that it was latched on securely.

The RAM load looked a little light, as only one DIMM was installed.  I said, "Hmm," to myself and went on with the inspection.

The DVD-RW unit is an EIDE/PATA unit, and attaches via the now-standard 80-conductor high-speed ribbon cable to the mainboard.  This cable is left flat, and is the only one which may obstruct airflow in the case to any degree.  With the space available in this case, though, it should really not be an issue.  (If I really get ambitious, I'll replace this with a more expensive round cable later on, but it is quite serviceable as it is.)  I note that no audio cable was connected from the sound card section, but that Amarok is able to play audio CDs just fine as I write this (so I have some reading to do to learn more about this...).

4.0)  Power-Up:

First power-up was accomplished off the network, just in case any problems might occur.  (This is a standard practice for me, and reflects some personal paranoia that is not entirely unjustified from past experience.)

Pressing the front panel power button brought the usual green glow from the LED embedded in it, and a subtle yellow flicker from the hard drive activity LED.  (I hate case LEDs that light up a room at night, and I'm grateful for the subtle touch here.)
 
Within about three seconds, the GRUB boot loader was timing down without any prior system splash screens being displayed, and PCLinuxOS 2008 was booting shortly thereafter. All was well, and this baby was fast.  Boot up took about twenty-five seconds, ten of which was GRUB timing down.  Can you say, "Zoom, zoom"?  Yeah.

I shut the system down and temporarily installed my wife's old 80 GB EIDE hard drive in the box so I could transfer data from it to the main drive on this machine.  I slaved it to the DVD-RW and connected it to power, then reattached the case cover.

Powering up the second time, I saw GRUB quickly enough, but now PCLinuxOS 2007 was attempting to boot.  Since this meant the old drive was attempting to boot up, and the new system architecture was different, I shut down, rebooted, and pulsed the [DELETE] key until I got into the BIOS setup.

In the setup, I noted that only two Gigs of RAM had been detected, so I called Eric.  (This was about seven PM Central Time, and he's in the Eastern Time zone and still answered the phone!  That was my first clue this was going to go well.)  I let him know that we only had 2 GB of RAM on the board, and, after he confirmed this (by asking how many DIMMs were on the board) he apologized for the slip-up, and assured
me that the extra RAM would be on its way to us on Monday, after I had assured him that I could handle the installation.

In my opinion, it's not a good thing when little mistakes like this occur, but Eric's willingness to own this one, and to make things right, went a long way in my book.  I will be tracking this issue closely until it is resolved, but expect little difficulty in the resolution.

There were other issues in setup that I took time to correct while I was looking for the boot order screen.  (This BIOS is not the best laid-out in the world, but it does cover everything well enough.):

   1.)  Fast Boot was enabled.  I normally leave fast boot off on my systems as
      they just don't get rebooted very often.  When they do, I like seeing
      the various checkout as a kind of system check-up.  This is personal
      preference, though, and I understand Eric wanting his systems to
      boot quickly for reasons of customer satisfaction.

   2.)  The floppy drive was listed as a 3.5 inch floppy drive, when none was
      installed.  I changed this entry to "Not Installed" to reflect the
      correct state of the hardware.

   3.)  I selected the DVD-RW as first boot device, then set up the SATA drive
      as the second.  The boot order screen has a sub-level for setting up
      hard drive seek order which I don't entirely like, but it works well
      enough after you've figured it out.

Rebooting after this brought MiniME up very quickly from the main drive   I began the task of transferring all my wife's data from her old hard drive.  36 Gigs of user data made the transfer to the new drive in just under 18 minutes!  Man, is this baby fast.

After user data came mail and browser settings.  These transferred without incident and Firefox and Thunderbird came up with no problems other than lack of network connectivity.  I shut the unit down and deployed it to my wife's desk.

Startup after deployment went smoothly, and the new system found the network almost immediately.  After downloading the stuff my wife can't live without (like Abiword, Koffice, some favorite games, Xine, and a few other things), installation did not go smoothly.  I had to open the Repository preferences in Synaptic and select a second repository, then try a second pass at the install to find everything.  About an hour
later, I turned the system over for use.  She is happy.  Life is good.

22 Jan 2009 - RAM Installation:

The other 2 GBytes of RAM arrived yesterday evening, and I took the time to install it today.  Not much difference in overall performance was noted, but my wife uses lots of windows at the same time to do stuff, so the added RAM will suit her needs very nicely.

Booting up after the install, I entered setup and discovered a feature not very well documented:  pressing F2 will change the BIOS setup screens from color to monochrome.  The new RAM was listed on the System Information screen, and showed the proper value of 4096 Gigabytes.  The RAM used in this system is made by Kingston Technologies, a reputable vendor for memory products.  Like everything else about this unit, it is first quality stuff.  I couldn't be more pleased.  This closes out the file on this purchase with a "Well Done" to Eric and all the nice folks at LinPC.us.  I will definitely be shopping here again when I have need of another system.
 

That oughta be enough information on the system and the company.  Eric is really a great guy, and takes his business seriously.  He'll definitely treat you right.

Later On,
D

[nixer]

Eric is really a great guy, and takes his business seriously.  He'll definitely treat you right.

+1

I have dealt with him before as well.  I have no complaints, none at all.

[bnc75ohm]

I've purchased 2 desktop machines and one notebook from Lin PC in addition to various parts and components.  On the rare occasion when I had a problem, Eric stuck with me till we got things sorted out.  I'll definitely be purchasing from Lin PC again.