I've been quietly coveting the Zonbu for a number of months now. I finally caved in and ordered one when we got back from Australia, with the intention of using it to replace minotaur, the computer that exports my RAID10 via ATA over Ethernet to my MythTV box.
minotaur is the old daedalus, which I bought back around 2000. It's a VA Linux Pentium III. It's old, noisy, and has no idea what power management is. The Zonbu has more grunt than it (in terms of BogoMIPS), and it's a fraction of the size. Our linen cupboard is now significantly quieter (and hopefully cooler). Heck, hopefully the power bill will be lower as well.
Anyway, I put the order in when we returned from Australia, with the expectation that it'd turn up some time while Sarah was in hospital, or shortly afterwards, and I could use the rest of the month that I was off work to play with it. Well, I got an email on the 31st of December, telling me they were out of stock, and unless I wanted to pay $29 more for one with built-in WiFi, I'd have to wait until mid-January.
As I just couldn't see the point of having WiFi (or spending more money) and not needing the thing in a hurry anyway, because I had more important things to worry about in the meantime, I opted to wait. This morning, I emailed them to enquire about whether or not more stock had arrived, and they emailed back to say that they were still waiting, but they'd found one they could sell to me anyway. The company happens to be close by in Menlo Park, so I picked it up today in our travels.
Let me just say that it is a very cool little computer, just if you use it for its intended purpose. It's running a customised Gentoo Linux, with a 2.6.22 kernel. I'm a bit surprised about their choice of Gentoo. I think they'd be better off partnering with Canonical, given that Mark Shuttleworth is trying to make a Linux distribution easy enough for his grandmother to use. That'd take the work of engineering the operating system out of the equation, then they could just focus on the hardware and a bit of integration with Amazon's S3.
The thing I have to give them mad props for is documenting how to hack the tripe out of the box. They tell you how to enable root. They tell you how to enable PXE booting. So once I figured out that the front USB port seems to get treated slightly differently for a USB keyboard than the back ones, it was very easy to PXE boot it and install Debian.
I initially started with trying to install Etch, but I kept getting missed interrupts on the CompactFlash device, which resulted in the filesystems panicking. So I gave up and went with Lenny, and presumably because it also uses 2.6.22, everything seemed to go fine. The box comes with a 4Gb CompactFlash card, which is ample for my needs. It's running the 686-optimised kernel, which is probably not ideal, but works. We'll see how things go.
Interestingly, I blew another hard drive power supply, exactly like last time. I've no idea if it's the act of plugging everything back in again that's causing the problem, or they're generally flaky, and they don't fail until they're powered off and back on again. Maybe that IEC Y-cable wasn't such a good idea after all. I've now run out of spare power supplies, so I'm going to have to get some more for when these two inevitably fry themselves.
Overall, I'm very pleased with this purchase, but it's a bit early to see how it's going to perform. I can't imagine it's going to perform worse than the computer it's replacing, but it was probably never intended for what I'm using it for either...
Oh, and I discovered vblade-persist, which seems to be a very nice framework for managing ATA over Ethernet exports.
Now I just need to get my hands on a big tub of Lego to build a nice chassis for the whole thing.