ALUSA Atom Desktop

There's no actual ALUSA branding on the box or the PC itself. The chassis itself is made mostly of plastic -- it would have been nicer to see a metal exterior, but this Foxconn chassis does appear to be durable enough for most environments.

On the front of the black PC were two audio ports, the MS/SD/MMC card reader, two USB 2.0 ports, the LED indicators, and the power and reset switches. On both sides of the ALUSA Atom Desktop are ventilation areas for seeing the Intel Atom processor and other components remain cool.

At the rear of the ALUSA Atom desktop are four more USB 2.0 ports, VGA output, HDMI output, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n antenna, and the DC power input.

The Atom D525 CPU was released by Intel in 2010. ALUSA has explained they are using this two-year old Atom and not anything newer due to the newer Atoms using PowerVR graphics, which are rather unfriendly towards open-source. Intel will switch back to in-house graphics with Valley View, but that's still several months out. It's unfortunate they are still shipping two-year-old hardware in a new system, but at least it's Linux-friendly rather than dealing with Poulsbo-era messy blobs.

Loaded up on the system sent to Phoronix as a sample was an Ubuntu snapshot with the GNOME Shell desktop, this is what they call the ALUSA 12.04 OS. When running the OS for the first time is the Ubuntu OEM customization walk-through. When ordering from the ALUSA web-site there's also the choices of having no operating system, Ubuntu 12.04, Kubuntu 12.04, or Xubuntu 12.04.