via EPIA motherboard

[Holger Hoffmann]

 > I would like to know if some of you have interesting experiences and
 > comments about these boards.
I've got two and I _love_ them. A 500Mhz Version is my fileserver 
running Linux (subject to change *g*) and a 800MHz Version is my FreeBSD 
"development" box (I play with it).

 > My main purpose is to setup a small, fanless multimedia playback freebsd
 > box, so any piece of info is valuable (driver support, computational
 > power, tv-output problems, ...)
Did that with the 500Mhz box, playing DivX was ok but definitely not 
good. I have to admit that I used a "quick and dirty" approach and took 
advantage of X and xine/mplayer instead of looking for stuff that e.g. 
might work without X neither did I tweak any parameters or switched off 
deamons I didn't need. So I guess you _can_ make it run 
faster/smoother/better than I did almost "out of the box".
Problems: read the handbook, took me almost a day to figure out why 
TV-out wasn't working when I saw that you have to change a jumper so 
that the plug changes from SPIF (or whatever) sound to TV-out.
I used the video drivers provided by VIA for X Free on (I think) Red Hat 
Linux without any problems.

HTH!
Holger