Back in July 2009 I was given a Viglen Contender MPC microcomputer by an associate and it piqued my interest as I thought it would make a great low powered torrent box. On closer examination it is a rebadged FIC ION A503 (also known as Linutop) and it is based on the AMD Geode LX chipset (think 486 speeds here) and comes complete with 512Mb of PC2700 RAM and a 40Gb 2.5″ hard drive. Viglen were suppliying these units with an out of date version of Xubuntu (7.04) which was out of maintenance. The unit I acquired had a standard Windows XP image including all the current applications in use at the client’s site. Watching it boot up was a painful experience, it must have taken all of 5 minutes to get to the desktop. However, once there the response was just about OK but I wouldn’t rely on this as a day to day workhorse.
I thought it would make a great low powered torrent box
After some research I decided that it was time that I got re-acquainted with Linux. Now Viglen chose Xubuntu for a definite reason. The hardware itself is not really up to running a more resource hungry graphical environment such as Gnome or KDE etc. Xubuntu runs the Xfce window manager as it is a lightweight GUI that is ideal for older systems that run on slower hardware. Sadly Viglen couldn’t get the basic install right which I believe resulted in a number of units being unbootable, that is unless you know how to fix these things.
