LinuxQuestions.org - Installed Arch Linux to an Alix 3d2 board

Recently discovered the great PC Engines company out of switzerland

http://pcengines.ch/alix3d2.htm

Used their model 3d2, which is the smaller of the offerings there. Specs:
-500MHz AMD Geode CPU
-256MB RAM
-1 CompactFlash adapter for the "hard drive"
-1 10/100 Rhine-III NIC, 2xUSB2.0 ports, serial for administration

All in a snazzy-lookin' brushed aluminum case. Apparently these things use .5-4 watts of power. Yay!

Got it to setup a password-protected MP3/WAV server for personal use.

Installation was somewhat interesting; the board does not support booting from USB drives of any sort, but can boot from the network. What I did was use another machine and setup a PXE/TFTP server with dnsmasq to provide the bootloader/files from an extracted ARch setup ISO, having to teach myself arcane stuff about serial ports (parity, stop bits, baud rate, the fact that a "null modem" cable looks exactly like a normal serial cable... crazy).

Additionally, during setup the boot process for the ISO would normally copy the entire install contents into RAM. This is nearly always not a problem; I believe it consists of around 300-400MB. With 256MB on this board however, this was not possible, the installer promptly ran out of memory. I had to add the copytoram=n option to my kernel line, and I learned (after several hours of setting up both an HTTP and an NBD server with which to provide the rest of the install files to the client) that, in this distro, using either of those servers results in the copytoram option being ignored; you must use NFS.

I've also learned that serial ports are very very very slow. :)

If anyone could conceivably be interested in this, the Arch Wiki has a fantastic concise guide on doing this sort of thing:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PXE