Alix2d3 board

Last week I’ve received the Alix board I’ve ordered from PC Engines, but up until now I did not had enough time even to open the package.

Designed and distributed by PC Engines, a Swiss firm with a long experience in the industrial and consumer embedded PC solutions, the Alix boards are the ideal hardware platform for applications like thin clients, wireless routers, firewalls and whatever needs a small form factor and a very low power consumption (~5W).

The model I bought is the Alix2d3, a headless system board with 3 network interfaces and 2 USB ports: the ideal to integrate a small router/firewall that I hope to use as NAS (with an external USB hard disk) and as print-server as well.

Here are some information about the board:

• 500 MHz AMD Geode LX800
• 256 MB DDR DRAM
• CompactFlash socket
• 44 pin IDE header
• 3 Ethernet channels
• 1 miniPCI slot
• DB9 serial port
• dual USB port

It has been some time since I started thinking to integrate a linux based firewall/router: I think I’ll start having fun trying to installing the Zeroshell distribution.