The Acer Aspire Revo R3610 as a Linux Server.

For many years I have been building Linux servers for my own web and mail services.
I've always limited by hardware costs to $500 or less by reusing old equipment.
Over the last several months, I have had hard drive failures on 3 of my servers, two of which I could live without. Last week, when the third system (my mail server) started to experience failures, I started looking for a replacement server.

I started to look at the PogoPlug as a possible solution. My new PogoPlug had just recently arrived in the mail, and it seemed like a good candidate as a mail server replacement. With is ultra small footprint and its low power consumption, I started hacking it with grand designs in mind. Unfortunately, after getting to the point of being able to install OpenPogo packages to a USB drive, I became cautious about making too many changes to the PogoPlugs sofware. Partly, due to the fact that I have come to enjoy what PogoPlug does best, making data on a hard drive that you have at home, available on the web for yourself and others (if you choose), in a safe a secure manner. Thus, I dropped any further major tweeking for now, until I can see a cleaner safer way of adding additional Linux services to the PogoPlug via OpenPogo, without compromising it's security or bricking it.

I took a trip to Fry's hoping to find a solution via a Shuttle X2700 mini-pc server. I only wanted to spend about $400 at most on the new server, but found that I would be at about $600 after buying the bare bones system, then adding the CPU memory and hard drive. So I lost interest in that route and looked at what they offered in terms of complete systems. Here, I came across the Acer Revo. It's an affordable mini-pc system that uses the ATOM processor, the R3610 is a 64bit processor with 2 cores. Linux actually reports 4 cores because each core can run 2 threads. I bought the R3610 for $329 plus tax. This gets me all I need for a server plus more.

The Acer Aspire Revo R3610 came with Windows 7. But I want Linux to be the main OS.
When I initially tried to boot the Ubuntu installer from a USB drive. I was disappointed to see the message "No Operating system found". I reformatted to USB drive to NTFS and used some procedures that I found on the net to make the USB drive bootable via an original Windows Vista bootable Install CD, but that did not work either as I got messages like "Bootmngr was not found." or "OS was not found.". The simple solution was just a few steps.

1. Download the iso for Ubuntu Server or Ubuntu Desktop.
   
2. Cleanly format a USB drive as FAT32.
3. Use the "Universal Netboot Installer" to place a bootable install of 64 bit Ubuntu Linux on the USB Drive. Just point the unetbootin utility to the Ubuntu iso and the USB drive letter of the newly formatted FAT32 USB drive.
4. Plug the USB drive into the Acer Revo.
5. Set the Acer Revo to boot from the USB drive.
6. Partition about half of the 160Gig drive to run Linux, and leave the other half for Windows 7.
7. Install Ubuntu...
   

Ultimately, I'd like to be able to run Windows 7 VM os to Linux via Xen.

But, I'll have to leave that experiment for later...

Acer Aspire Revo Specs:

AR3610-U9012Genuine Windows^® 7 Home Premium , Intel® Atom™ Processor N330 (1MB L2 cache, 1.60GHz, 533MHz FSB), 2GB (1/1) DDR2 800 SDRAM, 160GB SATA hard drive, multi-in-one card reader, NVIDIA® ION™ graphics, gigabit LAN, 802.11b/g/Draft-N WLAN