The Cubox Has Landed

Finally (and thanks to some nice people in Graz who resent a misaddressed package -- thanks guys!) my Cubox has arrived! It really is a cute little box:

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The Cubox is a nice little ARM-based computer, capable of running Linux and decoding HD content. It sports HDMI and SPDIF outputs, and boots from an internal SD-card. It has minimal power requirements (3 Watts when streaming, <1W in standby) and is real quiet, as in, you don't hear it at all. It has no internal storage but can mount USB drives, and, even more importantly, networked drives.

I intend to replace my ageing media center PC with this. It did it's job, but was relatively noisy and drew a lot more power (ie. I always turned it off when done and had to accomodate the boot time).

Installing XBMC was quite straightforward thanks to the Wiki. I still need to set up the SPDIF stuff, and also need a TOSLink cable (I'm usually not into high end audio but I hope to combat some hum I get when using regular cabling to the amp).

Bootup:

[    0.000000] Linux version 2.6.32.9-dove-5.4.2 (rabeeh@kossay-desktop) (gcc version 4.3.2 (sdk3.2rc1-ct-ng-1.4.1) ) #46 PREEMPT Sat Jan 7 12:23:38 IST 2012 [    0.000000] CPU: Marvell PJ4 v7 Processor-wmmx [560f5815] revision 5 (ARMv7), cr=10c53c7f [    0.000000] CPU: VIPT nonaliasing data cache, VIPT nonaliasing instruction cache [    0.000000] Machine: SolidRun CuBox Platform [    0.000000] Marvell Dove DRAM parameters found (version = 0x09080000) [    0.000000] Marvell Dove DVS parameters found (version = 0x09080000) [    0.000000] Memory policy: ECC disabled, Data cache writeback [    0.000000] On node 0 totalpages: 163840 [    0.000000] free_area_init_node: node 0, pgdat c0756e30, node_mem_map c07ff000 [    0.000000]   Normal zone: 1200 pages used for memmap [    0.000000]   Normal zone: 0 pages reserved [    0.000000]   Normal zone: 152400 pages, LIFO batch:31

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peter