This is a 15" LCD touchscreen with a Celeron 633MHz board with 128MB RAM in a wooden case of my construction. The case also contains the PSU. The bottom part of the screen surround hinges down to allow access to the monitor controls. The button mounted on the base is the power button and indicator light.
It has no hard drive and boots using PXE from my server, then mounts its filesystem over NFS. It runs Debian Linux, xorg, XFCE4, Metacity and Firefox. The button on the left of the panel at the bottom of the screen pops up a screen keyboard.
Currently I'm a bit concerned about the amount of heat that builds up from the PSU (reaches 75°C after a while), an external PSU might be required. Also it tends to run out of RAM when viewing stuff on google video (no swap, no hard drive).
Update: I've done some work on the insides, see here. It still looks the same on the outside.
Further update: I've switched from the above described software to running KDE. More details here.
Fibra, connors934, Otavio Ribeiro, and 3 other people added this photo to their favorites.
cell105 86 months ago | reply
Overheating is expected. Wooden construction retains heat.
What kind of ventilation and airflow does it have?
barnoid 86 months ago | reply
See the back for the ventilation. The holes in the top are above the PSU. I'm trying to avoid noise and so the only fan is on the CPU cooler. Hence I'd rather use an external PSU than stick fans in, though it will need to provide enough power for both the motherboard and screen.
cell105 86 months ago | reply
You'll need to stick in atleast one fan to have decent air circulation & thus bring the heat down. I don't see how you can do without it.
OndraSoukup 83 months ago | reply
Wow, nice :)))
maybe you could try some VIA motherboards with C3 processors for lower temperature...
lord_drachenblut 83 months ago | reply
what screen are you using for this case mod?
barnoid 83 months ago | reply
Not sure what make the screen is, I bought the insides from ebay. It used to be an information access terminal in a hospital. It came in a rather dull wall mountable plastic case. The touchscreen part is held to the front of the LCD with magnets around the edge. It connects to the PSU and to the serial port. It works with the 'fpit' X input device driver, which is also used for Fujitsu tablet PCs.
mrxoliver 82 months ago | reply
If you're running out of RAM and have a lot of linux experience, try out this; www.nfs-swap.dot-heine.de/
barnoid 82 months ago | reply
I use Network Block Device as swap on another disk free machine. It works quite well as long as the link stays up (if it goes down then stuff crashes), but it is quite slow. I'll probably just get some PC133 RAM off ebay or something.
modern anxiety 73 months ago | reply
great but why?
barnoid 73 months ago | reply
Because it was there.
JonyTut 50 months ago | reply
Can I use this pic in our Novosibirsk Linux User Group?
barnoid 50 months ago | reply
Of course. With attribution and link back here. See my profile for further writing about using stuff.