It came with a very nice selection of installed packages. I am using it headless and it works with very low power consumption. That’s all that matters to me.

I may go in and uninstall some of the installed packages that I won’t use to free up more disk space.

I set it up with a fixed IP on my home network. Don’t bother with the installed network packages. Readup on ifconfig and edit the /etc/network/interfaces file directly.

Rating: 5 / 5

Let me describe my setup. I use Elastix, which is a pbx Linux distribution based on Asterisk+FreePBX in a SOHO environment, 8 extensions, 1 telco like line, and 2 voip termination providers. It works beautifully and I seem to be underusing it. Processor has been always below 10%. It has replaced my “old” pbx that was running out of a wrt45gs Linksys router (which served its purpose but I had to have a very lean asterisk installation, there was no way to install FreePBX and all its prereqs with 8MB flash, 32Mb ram)

Advantages:

- Noiseless.

- Low power.

- x86 processor. Lots of options on what you can run on it.

Disadvantages:

- None so far.

Caveat: the GEODE LX800 processor has an i586 instruction set (actually is has all i686 instructions minus a couple) and that means that some Linux distributions (like Centos) may fail to install in it without tweaking.

Rating: 5 / 5

On the plus side, customer service responded to my forum post in a day and the build quality of the machine was obviously excellent. I’m going to try to purchase again.
Rating: 3 / 5

To run it headless you first have to log onto the box via the gui and install openssh. Once that is installed you can reboot and unplug the monitor and keyboard. To save on memory I disabled auto startup of the gui (gdm and X).

It has been a while since I’ve run linux at home, so ubuntu was a nice surprise: so far everything I’ve installed has worked flawlessly. Setting up samba was a breeze, as was the ruby and rails installation.

The 60Gb disk is partitioned 20/40 for gentoo and ubuntu respectively. I’m currently trying to work out how to safely merge the gentoo disk space into the ubuntu partition (I’m not knowledgeable about grub), but in the meantime 40Gb is more than adequate.

The one possible downside I’ve seen so far is that the case gets hot – an obvious side-effect of the fanless design. I am a little worried that the temperature inside the case will shorten component lifetime, but I haven’t any evidence of that, yet.

Rating: 4 / 5

It’s great to have a machine on the internet that you can Secure Shell (SSH) tunnel and then open RDP to test various network issues or external facing web applications.

This device also provides a great repository as a home file server to save importants documents.

I will probably purchase the newer model in the near future to sit next to this current model I chose to purchase as an experiment.

Great Product!
Rating: 5 / 5

I contacted MSI’s online technical support, and they demand information not included with the system package before they will even accept the form input. I would rate MSI technical support as “extremely unhelpful”.

I bought both the CS120 with the slot dvd player and Windows XP _and_ the barebones. If you only run Windows on the CS120, it probably is a good machine for you. The slot dvd player has some problems reading CDs. I may have a defective player, so I was able to install some old Windows software, and the slot player took a few seconds to decide how to read it. I inserted a Linux boot disk into the slot player, and it took at least a minute to decide how to read the iso boot sector and go into boot mode. Something is not well with this device. Also, after I booted Linux and did work with the “live” system and shut the machine down, the machine refused to boot up Windows. I kept getting an “insert disk and reboot” message from the bios. I managed to look into the bios and discovered that the hard drive (/dev/sda in Linux) was absent. There is a bios setting in the ide disks or boot configuration or both that you have to reset to hard drive present in order to boot up Windows again after booting up with any other than the hard drive as media. This also happened when I booted a Linux system from a sandisk compact flash inserted into the reader (mentioned in the previous review that it won’t boot at all from a pendrive).

Oh yes, the cs120 manual doesn’t mention it, but you push the delete button on the keyboard to enter the bios for editing.

Lucky I bought the barebones and a memory stick. The barebones came with the that information the cs120 was missing. I am writing this from a Linux slackware on 2 gigabytes of sandisk on the barebones. The barebones may have the same bios problems as the cs120, but I don’t immediately plan to find out, I am so pleased with it as a Linux machine.

So then I upgraded to the Atom 330 version of the machine after working out all the initial problems with the Atom 270 version to my _satisfaction_. I added ram, moved my hard drives over to the 330 version, flashed the bios to the same version I had working well on the 270, and it worked. The fan is quiet, because I had already dealt with that problem. Windows XP decided that the 330 version was OK and booted up. Windows Media Player 11 for XP asked me to validate, then went on to play a 720p high definition video from the Microsoft gallery with the 4 cpus showing no saturation and no obvious problem. In other words, once you get the hang of it, it is a sweet machine.

Rating: 4 / 5

I contacted MSI’s online technical support, and they demand information not included with the system package before they will even accept the form input. I would rate MSI technical support as “extremely unhelpful”.

I bought both the CS120 with the slot dvd player and Windows XP _and_ the barebones. If you only run Windows on the CS120, it probably is a good machine for you. The slot dvd player has some problems reading CDs. I may have a defective player, so I was able to install some old Windows software, and the slot player took a few seconds to decide how to read it. I inserted a Linux boot disk into the slot player, and it took at least a minute to decide how to read the iso boot sector and go into boot mode. Something is not well with this device. Also, after I booted Linux and did work with the “live” system and shut the machine down, the machine refused to boot up Windows. I kept getting an “insert disk and reboot” message from the bios. I managed to look into the bios and discovered that the hard drive (/dev/sda in Linux) was absent. There is a bios setting in the ide disks or boot configuration or both that you have to reset to hard drive present in order to boot up Windows again after booting up with any other than the hard drive as media. This also happened when I booted a Linux system from a sandisk compact flash inserted into the reader (mentioned in the previous review that it won’t boot at all from a pendrive).

Oh yes, the cs120 manual doesn’t mention it, but you push the delete button on the keyboard to enter the bios for editing.

Lucky I bought the barebones and a memory stick. The barebones came with the that information the cs120 was missing. I am writing this from a Linux slackware on 2 gigabytes of sandisk on the barebones. The barebones may have the same bios problems as the cs120, but I don’t immediately plan to find out, I am so pleased with it as a Linux machine.

So then I upgraded to the Atom 330 version of the machine after working out all the initial problems with the Atom 270 version to my _satisfaction_. I added ram, moved my hard drives over to the 330 version, flashed the bios to the same version I had working well on the 270, and it worked. The fan is quiet, because I had already dealt with that problem. Windows XP decided that the 330 version was OK and booted up. Windows Media Player 11 for XP asked me to validate, then went on to play a 720p high definition video from the Microsoft gallery with the 4 cpus showing no saturation and no obvious problem. In other words, once you get the hang of it, it is a sweet machine.

Rating: 4 / 5

If it had a Blue Ray Drive, the price would be more solidly justified.

Easy to use.
Rating: 4 / 5

Contrary to the printed instructions, the setup CD does not have the RealTek HD Audio Driver. In fact, the setup CD is titled “Server Drivers”. A search on the MSI website was no help.

Audio doesn’t work, so the 7.1 audio with it’s 8 connectors is useless.

The front panel CF Card Slot is also non-functional.

The internal CF card is unreachable, unless you take the motherboard out.

A slot on the side of the case would have been nice.

This unit runs hot so you will want to stand it on it’s end, with the vent on the bottom and the fan on top.

Rating: 4 / 5