You might want to look at the Via line of mini-ITX and nano-ITX mainboards.
The minis are 17cm x 17cm and have full VGA, USB, PS2, serial, parallel and
ethernet onboard. They support 1GB memory, IDE drives, and will run any
windows OS from Win98 on up and Linux also. They even have TV-out so you
could install a DVD drive on the PC and watch the output on a standard TV.
The nano-ITX board is 12 cm x 12 cm and has similar capabilities. See the
whole lineup at http://www.viaembedded.com/ I have found a lot of these
for sale on eBay and there are dealers with good discounts for new units.
Some of the Via mainboards run cool enough to require no fans for cooling.
These are slower speed boards, like 600 Mhz, but for most onboard PC uses
like electronic charting and email, web access, log keeping, etc that would
be fine.

There is also a company that makes DC-DC power supplies for these boards.
http://www.minibox.com has several models that take 12V input and produce
the full ATX complement of power for mainboard and disk drives. They plug
right onto the mini-ITX board. Minibox also sells the Via mainboards and
their prices are among the lowest for new boards.

For communications on a boat I would recommend an ordinary ethernet LAN,
either wired or wireless.

Don

"thuss" wrote in message
ps.com...
No, the Soekris does not have a VGA out, however, there are many small
X86 boards (mini-ITX, mini-ATX, etc..) to choose from that do. One
mid-range example that comes to mind are the boards from Arcom:

http://www.arcom.com/

which can run WinCE or embedded Linux. However, there are many other
choices on the X86 front to choose from.

-Todd

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