ALUSA Atom Desktop

With the ALUSA Atom Desktop shipping with Linux pre-installed, to no surprise all of the components just work fine. With the hardware basically being two year old technology, the support within Linux is also mature in terms of the Intel graphics driver fully supporting the hardware, suspend-and-resume working fine, and all of the other components seeming to function in a stable, trouble-free manner. The only trouble hit in the process was when using the HDMI connector, no mode above 1366x768 was being exposed with the GMA3150 graphics processor.

This ALUSA Atom Desktop has already been used in some Phoronix articles such as an Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 12.10 comparison along with Ubuntu boot speed testing and LLVM/Clang vs. GCC compilers from this compact PC. The ALUSA system will also be used in other upcoming articles. You can find other benchmark results for this ALUSA Atom Desktop by searching Foxconn NETBOX nT-435 on OpenBenchmarking.org. Overall though the performance isn't terribly surprising considering the age of the hardware.

If you're after a compact, low-power system that will work just fine "out of the box" with Linux, the ALUSA Atom Desktop is interesting. It isn't the most powerful system being based upon an older Intel Atom CPU, where if performance is more important they do have an AMD Fusion system in a similar chassis. From other vendors there are also Linux-friendly Intel Ivy Bridge low-power systems. Unfortunately, this system is rather expensive. The Intel Atom D525 system with 2GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive with integrated GMA 3150 graphics is retailing at ALUSA's web-site for about $450 USD (349€). From other vendors, the barebone version of the Foxconn NetBox-nT535 for which this system is based can be easily found for less than $200 USD and it's certainly easy to add in the memory and hard drive yourself and would work out to being a lower price. There are also other Atom D525 systems still on the market and their prices -- with RAM and HDD storage -- range from $210 to $430 USD at popular Internet retailers in the United States.

For those wishing to learn more about ALUSA's Linux-friendly products can visit ALUSA.org.