Pogo Linux: 1GHz for under $1000

Linux, Pre-Installed

It's almost eerie to see this machine come up to its custom LILO screen on startup. As easy as Linux is to install now, it still is the first step a user must do with a new machine. Imagine buying a new machine and having Linux already set up for you, instead of some other operating system.

This machine came preinstalled with Red Hat 7.0, upgraded to the date that the machine was sent to us and including the latest Helix GNOME packages. In addition, the GeForce2 MX had been set up and was running with NVIDIA's GLX drivers, release 0.9-5, which was up to date as well. The 0.9-6 drivers were released after we received this machine.

Drive Information

As reported, the drive is attached to the Promise controller, a secondary controller. The appropriate drivers are compiled into the kernel itself and the primary drive comes up as /dev/hde. Partitions were set up as follows:

That's more partitions than we would typically desire on an end user machine, but they're not going to cause any major problems for most people.

The next thing we checked for was hdparm paramaters. Often, DMA and 32bit I/O are not enabled by default when installing a new distribution. On the Pogo machine, these capabilities were enabled by means of an init script named sethdparm (as in Set Hdparm), which enabled DMA, 32bit I/O and the drive's write caching functionality. The drive achieved 34 MB/s transfer rates when tested with hdparm's '-t' option. Multi-sector I/O was not enabled, although the drive supports up to 16 sectors to be transferred per I/O interrupt. Enabling this option did not provide any faster throughput, however. The drive was correctly registered at UltraDMA Mode 5 (ATA/100).

When examining the dmesg output, we found the CD-ROM coming up as a SCSI device. Intrigued, we discovered that IDE CD-ROM support had not been compiled into the kernel and the dmesg output was the SCSI emulation allowing the drive to be registered as a SCSI CD-ROM. Further, SCSI support in the kernel included the "Probe all LUNs for each SCSI device" option, intended for devices such as CD changers in which there may be multiple media available from a single device. This resulted in the drive actually being registered as /dev/sr0 through /dev/sr7. While not a problem in itself, we considered this setup to be rather unique and scratched our heads for quite a while to come up with an advantage to using SCSI emulation all the time and denying standard IDE access to the drive. SCSI emulation is often needed by cdrecord to burn recordable CD/DVD media, but even ripping audio CDs can be done flawlessly without SCSI emulation. When asked, Pogo responded that 90% of their machines are shipped with CD-RW's. This explains the need for SCSI emulation in the kernel, and we would assume that by disabling IDE CD-ROM support, they simplify installations and (more importantly) support. This setup guarantees that the end user will be able to use his or her CD-RW without first trying to use the IDE device.