I recently picked up a Zotac IONITX-C-U. This board caught my attention because it is fanless, low-power, and has a plethora of outputs available for such a small footprint. My plans for the board were to build a media pc to use in my living room. In this post I’ll be describing the process required to make it happen.
I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this post you are somewhat familiar with putting a pc together from scratch. The build process was uneventful for the most part, with one exception. This board has an on board power supply and comes with an ac-adapter. On the board there is a four-pin molex connector into which you plug a pig tail with 3 sata power plugs on it. The people at Zotac probably assume that this board will be placed in a tiny case to make use of it’s small size requirements, so this pig-tail is only about 6 inches long. In other words, if your hard drives are going to be more than 6 inches from this plug you’re out of luck. That being said, we’ll move on.
After getting the board installed in the case I powered it on and installed Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 from an external usb dvd drive. The installation was completely painless, and in no time I was looking at an Ubuntu Gnome desktop. I next allowed Ubuntu to install all the latest updates. I was surprised however, that I had not been bothered about installing restricted Nvidia drivers. This is because, at the time of this post, Ubuntu did not recognize the Nvidia ION chipset this board shipped with. I went to the Nvidia website and downloaded the latest linux driver for the ION Chipset. The version I downloaded was 185.18.14. I saved the file to my desktop and did chmod 755 <filename> to make the file executable. In order for the driver to be built you will need the package “build-essentials” installed so from a terminal window type “sudo apt-get install build-essentials.” Next, in order to install the drivers you have to stop your xserver so I opened a terminal and typed “sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop.” This dropped me to a shell prompt. I then logged in as my user changed to my desktop directory where I saved the file and ran “sh <filename>.” The installer will attempt to download a kernel module pre-complied for your kernel but if it can’t find one it will have to build one so I let it do that. At the end I let it update my xorg.config file and then restarted my xserver by typing “sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start.” Now I was greeted with my desktop once again except this time with display effects provided by the Nvidia graphics drivers.
In order to install the latest version of XBMC I followed the instructions on this page. Then typed “sudo apt-get install xbmc” and xbmc was installed. I wanted to be able to control the box with a IR remote so I installed “lirc” by typing “sudo apt-get install lirc,” then specifying which remote I would be using.
Now XBMC was up and running so lets talk performance. I primarily will be using this box for playing 720p mkv files and listening to music. The first file I tried to play caused the cpu usage to go up to about 60%. However, XBMC now supports VDPAU so I enabled that by changing Settings->Video->Player->Rendering->VDPAU. To my amazement, the cpu usage dropped to 6-9% usage while watching the same file! It handled the playback beautifully as well with no dropped frames or quality issues.
So far I’ve been very impressed with this little board. I’m sure I’ll find many more uses for this box in the future.
Did a search for this specific board type from newegg and xbmc and found your article.
I have been using xbmc on the xbox for years, (and run xbmc on windows for my children in their rooms to my shared media) – but finally moved to an HD TV in the living room.
You did exactly what I am looking to do! Run XBMC (hope to actually run the live verison) on a fanless ion platform. Primary need is 720p for my new camera. Plasma only does 720p, so there is no need for the $$$ right now to shoot for 1080.
Sinse its been about 3 months,
How is this working for you still?
Good playback for different formats and decent menu response?
The VDPAU still keeping the CPU happy?
Thanks in advance for your time!
Michael
Hey Michael, yes everything is still working well. I use this box to watch a 720p movie about once a week. When I’m not using it for that, I use it to play slacker internet radio through my receiver.
For me the only thing it’s lacking is DVR but if you want that you really have to switch to MythTV, and in my opinion, XBMC provides a way nicer user interface than MythTV.
Mine does seem to get a little warm if I watch a 3 hour movie on it but not so hot that it makes me uncomfortable.
Good luck with your project and feel free to give me a shout if you run into issues along the way.
John
John, were you able to get Slacker working through XBMC? Or do you just drop down to Gnome and run it there?
I had Slacker working initially with a python plugin but it seemed to constantly need updating so I stopped updating it after three or four iterations.