My new Dell system arrived a bit earlier than expected. It’s not as tiny as some of the other HTPC solutions out there, but here it is compared to the behemoth that it’s replacing:
Despite its size, it’s still a pretty heavy little thing. As you’d expect things are pretty tight inside, with cables just barely reaching the spots they’re supposed to, but it was still fairly straightforward to open it up and put my own drives and tuner card in. The drive bays use this nifty mechanism where instead of being screwed into place, it uses the screws to guide you along channels to slide the drive into place and they’re then held with a plastic locking clip.
Installing Ubuntu was also fairly painless. I opted for a fresh install of 8.10 rather than just directly copying over the old install since some fundamental things have changed (e.g., audio support) and I’m not sure my old install was really set up properly by modern standards anymore. The only problem so far is that the built-in Ethernet driver for this chipset had horrible performance, with a lot of dropped packets. Fortunately Realtek had an updated driver on their site, and it works just fine.
So the new system is up and running, but there’s still a lot of work to bring it back into production…