Mini Linux PC inside Windows PC (idea)

Rusty4560

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 24, 2007
Messages
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I currently have a Mountain Mods U2-UFO case. For those of you who are not familiar with this case, it is essentially 2 mid tower cases mount side by side to be a cube. That being the case, there are 2 spots to mount a power supply. Since I have a single machine in it currently there is one spot free with nothing in it.

My idea:
Take a power supply case, gut it, put a micro/mini atx board in it, put linux on it and profit?

Practical Uses: Web Browsing, Media Consumption, Email, other productivity software.

Questions:
Is there a board small enough that would fit in a PSU case (5.9" x 6.3")?
Will a Linux distro such as .. "Mint"? .. work well on a set up like this?
How should I go about supplying power to this set up?
Other concerns/comments?


P.S. I am essentially trying to use Linux as my main OS for day to day tasks and windows for my gaming needs.

Thanks
 
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It's not a dumb idea at all. A few years ago I put a dedicated secondary system in a NZXT Rogue. It was based on a VIA pico-ITX board. Something like that would easily fit in a gutted PSU. You could even go slightly bigger with a nano-ITX.

Note the lower left of this pic. You can see the pico and it's hard drive. There's not much space taken up at all.

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Here is a pic of the exterior. The system was used as a dedicated file server inside the main system. That LCD on the front is for the pico. Using a program like Synergy, I could seamlessly transition between the main system and the secondary. Although I was running Windows, most Linux distros would work just as well.

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I currently have a Mountain Mods U2-UFO case. For those of you who are not familiar with this case, it is essentially 2 mid tower cases mount side by side to be a cube. That being the case, there are 2 spots to mount a power supply. Since I have a single machine in it currently there is one spot free with nothing in it.

My idea:
Take a power supply case, gut it, put a micro/mini atx board in it, put linux on it and profit?

Questions:
Is there a board small enough that would fit in a PSU case?
Will a Linux distro such as .. "Mint"? .. work well on a set up like this?
How should I go about supplying power to this set up?
Is this a dumb idea? :p
Other concerns/comments?

Thanks

What do you plan to do with it? It's only dumb if you're doing it for no reason.

Micro ITX is 17cm x 17 cm (6.7" x 6.7"), most PSUs that I know of are smaller than that. You could look into nano-itx/pico-itx, but that's a really niche market and as you use more obscure hardware, the linux compatibility starts to get more and more difficult (especially if it's your first linux endeavor). Mint and Ubuntu are made to be installed on a plethora of hardware though, and shouldn't give you too much trouble.

Once you've got it to fit, powering it is easy. It'll be low powered, so a pico PSU or something like that will be perfect.
 
That is really cool. I'm digging the whole set up. I really like the vent look on the top and the screen mounted through the front.

How did you power the board? Was it something like an external power brick or did you have to run it off of your main PSU. If off the main PSU then you would need it on all the time with the other system correct?
 
I would like to start using Linux for browsing and productivity so that I can reserve my Windows machine for games "exclusively". I used Red Hat "5?" I think and Ubuntu "6?" about .. 8 years ago lol. So this is more or less like me being new to Linux. That's kind of why I was thinking Mint or Ubuntu, but I've heard Ubuntu is getting ads or something stupid. I dunno.

Also I started a new job that is kind of heavy in unix/aix. So I would like to help myself with that by kind of forcing myself to use Linux as a main OS.
 
It was powered with a separate pico-psu and power brick. I had explored powering it through the main PSU, but ultimately it just didn't make sense. The idea was to have it completely independent. The main system was already dual PSU. Under the pico board was a 24v 600 watt secondary PSU running a 437watt peltier attached to the water cooling system. The main PSU itself was 1200 watts. So, I really didn't want the main system running more than needed. I would leave the pico system on all the time though. It would basically act as a download server.
 
I have a few REALLY OLD blade servers that are p3 700's on a pci card. They have everything on the card, cpu/chipset/vga/ide/2-3nic's, everything. They basically just use power from the PCI slot (and if you can find the drivers they supported a virtual nic, and could mount drives over the pci as well). I have always thought it would be cool to stick one of those in a server and run like a little linux router on it or something heh.
 
I've used most versions of Linux. Ubuntu itself has great support. I think what you are referring too, are not ads specifically. It's more like featured/sponsored Amazon integration in it's search results. I don't mind it, but for others it feels counter to the idea of free and open...

My wife is running Mint on a laptop and likes it because it feels like windows. If you are going for minimalism in both resources and interface, crunchbang can be fun too.
 
Maybe get a Raspberry Pi? That thing is so small you could put it in a 3.5" floppy drive slot so you can access the ports from the front.
 
What I was thinking was to have the pc mounted in the empty PSU slot in the back and running the power, network, usb and video out the back. I would buy a $25 usb switch on monoprice to use the same peripherals for both machines and I use a tv for my monitor so I have 3 HDMI ports to work with for video. Then run a spare HD off the mini pc into one of my 8 HDD slots that are close to the PSU mount area.

The raspberry PI idea is a good one but the inputs are on all 4 sides I believe. So plugging in anything would be somewhat of a hassle.
 
A computer big enough to hold another computer inside it is big enough to hold the hardware necessary for virtualization, a technology which put ideas like yours to bed already.
 
Virtualization would not force me to use Linux exclusively. I would most likely find myself relying back to windows to do the task that I want to force myself to learn.

Also I think this will be a fun little project for myself.
 
Is there a size between Mini ITX ( 6.7"x 6.7" ) and the Pico-ITX ( 3.9" × 2.8" )? It seems a power supply is 5.9" x 6.3"
 
Virtualization is fine if you want to leave the power hungry pig on all the time. I think a low wattage 24/7 setup inside is a super cool idea.
 
Besides the Pico-itx and Nano-itx form factors, you might want to look into Single Board Computers (SBC's). They come in 3.5" and 5.25" varieties which roughly correspond to the Pico and Nano-itx standards. SBC's are also a lot more readily available, however they tend to be more expensive since they are designed for specialized computing like embedded computers, cash registers, video signage, etc. They are readily available with all sorts of ARM, Via, AMD, and Intel cpu's in them pre-soldered or with sockets to put a mobile chip in them.

Here is a good example of one:
http://www.commell.com.tw/product/SBC/LS-37B.HTM
LS-37B-3DB.jpg
 
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That looks interesting. I'll have to look into that. I would ideally like a set up that ran well in Mint or Ubuntu without being sluggish. So I'm gonna need to find out what the average requirements would be.
 
Thread update. I now have money to do this project and would like to know if there are any other alternatives. A lot of the stuff I've been looking at seem to be relatively low specs. Wondering how well these machines will run Mint/Ubuntu.
 
Why don't you do one of the new Intel NUC machines? They are very small, you could toss one inside of your pc case and extend the plugs or wires somehow.

All depends on how custom you want to do, could just do a KVM and have a small second computer no?
 
If the PSU machine wouldn't be powerful enough to do what I need, I may just build a second machine into my other project I'm working on. I'm really looking to have 2 computers in one box for the convenience. I would use a usb switch and the different video inputs of my monitor instead of a KVM. My office is small so I don't want to machines taking up the space.
 
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