I am a contract instructor and write Linux Course material. I want to use the PC3 or PC2 in portable classrooms.

Does anyone know if the fitPC3 will support KVM. If not does the fitPC2.

I am looking at the PC2 because I need to ethernet ports.

I appreciate your help

There is no known KVM issues with the FitPC2 or the FitPC3 under the Linux OS. If you are looking for a FitPC3 with a multiple ethernet ports, there is such FitPC3's face module up to come

To counter the AMD/ATI FUD here; I've used Linux Certfied AMD boxes from Novell's certification list, upgraded to AMD Radeon HD 3 1/2 years ago. Furthermore I am buying an AMD Fusion system with no concern.

For many years I have used AMD 64 with Radeon HD graphics and my experience has been good, with out of the box 3D, as mentioned by another AMD's take over changed the story, with documentation and better support.

Performance for Linux 3D games & compositing window managers was perfectly good. The main issue for me, has been inferior dynamic power management in the FOSS driver compared to Catalyst, which I solved with a simple script to automatically put the HD card in a slower medium speed mode for normal Desktop work, and a low power mode at server console. Once when testing a new Linux release, I discovered a kernel config bug for the power saving modes, because the dyanamic CPU governor was set to sample far too slowly. Otherwise performance has been consistently excellent, the change to KMS (kernel mode setting was painless), I think I discovered a bug or two in "extremetuxracer" testing distro pre-release; but games like "neverball" I had no trouble with.

The proprietary drivers support a number of major distribution repos. I actually switched because I disliked Nvidia proprietary drivers in past, which caused me kernel upgrade issues in past and declaring as "legacy" cards, which were (and are still) perfectly useable. From what I have seen in Distro forums, most people aren't running the OpenGL 3 programs and beyond, which had needed proprietary graphics driver & Nvidia graphics.

Other threads cover the lack of hardware acceleration for flash under Linux, so for HD Media PC the advice given to go with dual core 1.6GHz CPU rather than low power ought to be taken. For my part with X2 2.8GHz cpu, it spends most of it's time in power saving 1GHz mode, on standard definition Flash play back. Quite often AMD 64bit Linux performance was much better than Vista (& actually more stable than 7 at first) for "normal" web browsing and video play back.

I tried this with Linux and a Fit PC Pro a while back with the Radeon HD 6320 and it failed horribly. Choppy playback etc etc. It all boiled down to low amount of RAM allocated to the UMA buffer - so unless there is a BIOS update that enables you to raise this to 512 it will never work.

Zotac has for instance release a BIOS update for their devices that enables this.

Best Regards

Dac

Can you please elaborate?

OpenELEC Installation guide for AMD Fusion

http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title ... tab=Fusion

Same graphics card but on a Zotac where a BIOS update fixed it by allowing to increase UMA Buffer size from 256 to 512.

http://openelec.tv/forum/117-xvba-amd/4 ... k-problems

/Dac

I think in the fitPC3 the video memory size is dependent on the size of DDR3 memory present in the machine. Catalyst Control Center say the 6320 is having 384 MB of video memory in my machine running 8 GB of system memory.

Still it would be nice if the BIOS would alow us to up that to 512 MB for those who need more graphical power and have memory to spare.

Regards,

Jean

Exactly and in the case of a bare bones Linux with XBMC ontop as in OpenELEC its not like the memory is needed elsewhere - even if you have 2 or 4 gigs only.

The result is still that a Zotac box with slower CPU can still do what my Fitpc 3 can not - ie play HD video content propperly, without framefreezes etc - on linux anyway.

/Dac

I totally agree. I hardly need more than 500MB from the 3GB available. So it is a real pain to see so much wasted if instead video playback performance could be increased. I have used fitPC 3 Pro (with standrad fglrx proprietory drivers from the Xubuntu 12.04 repos) as a media center now for almost two years, but it becomes more and more frustrating as more and more Blue-Ray rips become available (where playback performance is too poor to have fun).

A reply/fix would be greatly appreciated.

I have installed Ubuntu 13.04 with Unity and the proprietary AMD drivers on my newly acquired fit-PC3 pro and was disapointed by the video performance . Playing HD movies either with Kaffeine or VLC was impossible. I tested with glxgears and got figures around 600.
I then installed gnome 2 fallback ( sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback ) and then glxgears was between 900 and 1000. HD video were also a catastrophy.
I installed XBMC and called it from the terminal in the gnome session.
Again I could not look at HD videos.

Finally, and THIS is the SOLUTION:
At the login, do NOT choose a Unity or a Gnome session, but login in a XBMC session. XBMC perfectly displayed the HD videos which were loaded on an external harddisk with HDMI and Sound!

Hope this helps !