Hello, Long time lurker, and old time attempter... (waay back in v1 with an sis 535 or something like that)... Anyway, I have a project that our company may be undertaking and some of it relies on instant on / small form factor computers. Think kiosk type system. We'll be running linux, custom built or one of the super small distros, built to run off a CF card or boot off the network. Here's where I've got some questions that I imagine people on this list may have some expertise.
We'd hope to have something that has hardware accelerated graphics capabilities (likely using DirectFB for graphics) so something that has linux drivers would be a major plus. We'd potentially like to use more than one monitor per device. We don't need many of the common parts on a regular PC or mini-ITX type boards, but are wondering what kind of company you would approach to get something like that built. We'd like to have coreboot as the bios to help with boot times etc. If you were looking for something like that, where would you go? Most of the miniITX boards don't quite fit the need. I'm wondering what volumes you'd need for a custom board to reach that same price, considering we'd really have very little on the device, cpu, ram, cf, video and a network. Which I guess describes almost all computers... Anyway, pointers on where to purchase, or get a board developed that could do stuff like this. We've initially contemplated the Via boards, but have seen that there are more and more offerings out there. The Geode based systems could be fine if there was hardware assistance for the graphics we imagine... Anyway, any pointers on a stuff like this would be appreciated.