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Installing Ubuntu on a Zotac Zbox Nano VD01 part II

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So, how did I do? I gave up, that’s how. The graphical installer just won’t work without drivers and I can’t install drivers before I’ve installed the OS. Plus the drivers seems to be very outdated. Don’t buy this computer unless you want to get really frustrated before you get X up and running (if you ever get it running). I’d buy something based on the ION platform or AMD Fusion instead.

VD01

VD01

So, what to use it for? Ubuntu Server works nicely on it, so I guess as a small and power efficient server maybe?

Installing Ubuntu on a Zotac Zbox Nano VD01

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The Zotac Zbox Nano VD01 is a palm sized computer with a VIA Nano dual core x86-64 CPU. I got one without hard drive and memory, I thought I’d add that myself. I had 1 GB of DDR3 SDRAM in spare, so I put that in plus a 4 GB SD-card. Now, what about installing Ubuntu? The easiest way I could think of, after considering some alternatives, was to install Ubuntu on the SD-card in VMware and then move it to the Zotac. Said and done, I installed Ubuntu Server and successfully started the Zotac, Ubuntu booted as expected.

I were not able to do this with Ubuntu Desktop (just couldn’t get the graphics to work, wrong refresh rate) and since Ubuntu Desktop doesn’t come with SSH server I’ve installed the ubuntu-desktop meta package on top of Ubuntu Server. A word of warning, 4 GB isn’t very much space. I have about 250 MB left right now. Probably shouldn’t have created a swap partition. :)

Unfortunately it’s still FUBAR and won’t display any X graphics. I’ll post any progress I make.

The Zotac Zbox

The Zotac Zbox