Israel's maker of small fanless computers CompuLab has revealed a tiny computer for Linux lovers, the MintBox Mini. A fifth of the size of the original MintBox, which was based on the company's fit-PC3 and launched in 2012, the silent, fanless Mini will come with a quad-core processor, solid state storage and be available in the second quarter of 2015 for US$295.
The passively-cooled MintBox Mini is based on CumpuLab's new fitlet PC. Within its 10.8 x 8.3 x 2.4 cm (4.25 x 3.27 x 0.95 in) enclosure, the company has managed to pack in an AMD A4 6400T processor, a Radeon R3 GPU, 4 GB of DDR3 RAM (supports up 8 GB) and 64 GB of solid state storage.
Connectivity is served up in the form of 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, three USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0, a microSD reader, an audio jack and two HDMI ports. The MintBox Mini will run the Linux Mint 17.1 MATE 64-bit edition OS in OEM mode out of the box.
The MintBox Mini comes with a 5 year warranty and a percentage of the sales proceeds will go to Linux Mint.
Source: CompuLab
Compare with a tiny desktop - HP Stream Mini and Pavilion Mini starting at $180.
the Stream Mini is designed to be cloud-based, which is another way of saying it lacks a traditional hard drive. Inside, you'll get a small 32GB SSD, most of which will likely be taken up by the operating system files. The processor is a low-power Intel Celeron, and the RAM in the Stream Mini gets cut to only 2GB.
Not quite in the same race.
This could be my next MythTV box.
Windows? Did you read the part about "The MintBox Mini will run the Linux Mint 17.1 MATE 64-bit edition OS in OEM mode out of the box".
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I'd be interested, if it only had a decent SSD!
And what other computer on Earth comes with a 5 year warranty these days?
I would have to say that this is an excellent deal. In my opinion Mint is a great OS. I've been using it as my desktop OS for 2-3 years now. I even replaced Windows with Mint on my father's, son's and wife's computers ... and none of us miss Windows in the least.
I'm sure some others won't feel the same as we do because some people will never be happy with anything other than Windows. But for us Mint has been a huge time and money saver, not the least of which is the result of Mint never getting screwed up with undesirable viruses or malware. It just works, at least for us.