I didn’t mention it but last week Thursday I came across a Wyse SX0 S90 thin client at the downtown RE-PC store. It was $10 I picked it up thinking it was a minor risk.
I was really happy with it and picked up two yesterday, they are not as good as the first one, but still pretty happy with it.
Here is my review
Wyse SX0 S90 Thin Client
It is not a Raspberry Pi but it is a cheap PC.
First the bad stuff
- This unit came with Windows XP on it but I did not think I was going to go with it, instead I loaded CentOS 5.7 on a 4GB USB flash drive and ran it from there.
- The local storage on these devices was also failing. So it made sense to go with an OS that could run on a Flash Drive. The problem with running on a flash drive is IO, if it needs to access something on disk it could be really slow. I am using a cheapo USB flash drive, maybe a better quality one would be better.
- Another problem was the time, it did not seem to persist if you unplugged the power supply. There does not seem to be a battery I could replace, to have time persist when it is unplugged.
- Another problem is that I had to leave it plugged in for a bit before I could power it on. Seemed like something needed to “charge up” before I could turn it on.
But there are some really good things about this unit.
- Low low power usage I think it is using 6.6 watts, anyway it is low. I will put my kill-a-watt on it later to see what its draw is.
- It can PXE boot, USB boot and local boot, making building it pretty simple. You don’t have to deal with weird embedded booting process.
- It has audio, video, usb, network, and serial. Making it an ideal environment for a supplmental arduino and X10 control center.
- Finally, the most important feature, it is dirt cheap, $10, here’s the receipt
Wyse Receipt
This is for 2 and included the power supply (thanks Jake at RE-PC), there was a sticker price of $40 and it is not supposed to include a power supply. But the power supply would have been just $2 more and I got it for $10 because there were others for $10, same thing.
Here is the cpuinfo
# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : Geode by NSC cpu family : 5 model : 5 model name : Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by National Semi stepping : 2 cpu MHz : 398.457 cache size : 32 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu de pse tsc msr cx8 pge cmov mmx mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow up bogomips : 796.91
Has 256MB of RAM, more than enough for Linux (and what I am going to do with this)
If I did not like this unit, I would not have gone back and purchased two more. I want to get more, but now I am just getting greedy.
Back to my training
I ran today, it was finally dry enough, but farking cold. Just a 1 lap though.
Time: 12:16.54