Hands On With The VIA ARTiGO A1100

If you have not yet noticed, I am a nerd. Not just your garden variety, everyday, commonplace nerd, but a big nerd. With that cleared up, I could not help but purchase an ARTiGO. Over the past month (maybe longer), I have been testing different operating systems on it, and I think I can confidently declare a winner for best fit, and another for best performance. I did not have the Wifi Kit or the SD card reader installed for the tests. I am using 2GB of Crucial DDR2 800mHz RAM, and a 500GB 7200 RPM 2.5" SATA for the HDD.

Ok, so first up was Debian (AMD64). I chose to use Debian first because of the FTP installation ability, which was handy considering that I wanted to try and boot from USB. The installation went well. The hardware was all detected, and I then went ahead and did an apt-get on XFCE, X11, and related packages. Here, there was a small snag. The version of openchrome that was in the apt repository would not work with the ARTiGO's VX855 chipset. This wasn't a major upset. I went ahead and did the defacto solution "#X -configure && mv xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf" and then opened the xorg.conf file for editing and changed the driver from openchrome to vesa. That got things running. After compiling the proprietary driver for the VX855, X11 was working well enough.

Ubuntu was the next up (though I used the Linux Mint respin). Once again, I chose the 64bit version. The results were nearly identical to those of Debian. This isn't too surprising considering that Debian is Ubuntu's momma.

My two favorite distributions failed to install properly (Blag and Slackware). With Slackware there were some problems with the detection of the hard disk. Essentially, LILO and the kernel saw things differently. This was resolved with a live boot, chroot, and change of the LILO configuration file. Openchrome didn't work well, and once again the proprietary driver solved the issue. Blag wouldn't install at all. The currently stable ISO is a bit dated, and the distro failed to detect most hardware.

Sorcerer Linux worked fantastically well. There were virtually no problems what-so-ever. The only detraction here was that the VIA's CPU is a single core 1.6 gHz Nano, with relatively small cache sizes. As such, compile times were incredibly lengthy, although I did do a few optimizations for VIA CPUs that helped. These were rather involved and required some serious hacking. I do not recommend this for the faint hearted. Without those optimizations, compilation of even the most basic system can last several days.

Windows XP 32bit (TinyXP respin by eXPerience was used) worked well, after getting it to boot from a USB stick. Video was great (after tweaking in mplayer classic), audio was great, and everything else seemed to do fairly well. Overall performance, however, was not as good as any of the Linux distributions mentioned. This was rather humorous considering that most of the Linux distributions lacked certain drivers.

Windows 7 Professional 64bit seemed a little sluggish on the first go-around. After disabling several processes I knew I wouldn't need, things sped up a little, but never came close to Linux. Video playback never seemed very smooth either.

SliTaz worked perfectly. It booted with the Vesa driver, although a quick tazpkg search showed me openchrome. I installed it, and performance was good enough to not warrant using the proprietary driver.

OpenSolaris wouldn't play well with hardware, and NetBSD didn't seem to like the video chipset at all. Vesa only on both. Haiku worked well, though networking seemed flaky. For all three, I gave 'em poor ratings considering that networking, audio, and video are all I wanted from the machine.

Overall, I would say that SliTaz is the best fit. Seeing as most things worked fairly well right away, and no closed-source code was needed (this is an opensource blog after all) I would rate SliTaz an 8 of 10. The only reason for point docking being that overall performance left something to be desired. The best performance goes to Slackware. The boot time was bad, but once booted Slackware was a charm.