vuxu.org: Minerva

Minerva is a Thintune eSeSIX WLVI01 (VIA Samuel 2, 533 MHz, added 512 MB RAM) running OpenBSD.

The naming

[Minerva] was the virgin goddess of poetry, medicine, wisdom, commerce, weaving, crafts, magic, and the inventor of music.

It was initially be meant as a compact file server (wisdom) as well as MP3 player (music), but probably Kali will do that now. I’ll keep using it as an X terminal, because the embedded S3 works very well with X.org and actually can drive my 21” Lenovo L201p at its native resolution of 1600x1200 over VGA without too much noise.

Benchmarks

  • Power Usage (without battery)
    • Boot: 20 W, Idle: ~16 W, Peak: 22 W

Setup

Since it only has 32 MB internal flash, the flash only keeps the bootloader and the kernel files. GRUB2 then loads the kernel which finds the root filesystem on a USB stick connected to an USB 2.0 controller I added in the free PCI slot.

To configure “root on sd0a, swap on sd0b” one needs to rebuild the OpenBSD kernel. (Please tell me if there is a different way.)