[Zope] Stupid Zope question for the week!

[David Mitchell]

Hello everyone,

I'm about to take on a contract that will have me flying out from home 
every Monday morning and flying back every Friday night.  I'll be 
staying in THE most boring city in the world, in a poky hotel room with 
absolutely nothing to do at night at all, for months on end.  Sounds 
good, doesn't it?

I'd like to have some sort of computer in my room while I'm away, so I 
can do all the usual stuff (read email, surf net, IM, and work on my 
part-time Zope project).

Initially, I considered the obvious two options:
- laptop.  My two laptops are both several years old, and are a LONG way 
  from being able to run XP or a relatively modern Linux.  Both were 
bought when I was doing a lot of travelling; when I'm at home, they sit 
plugged into the wall and unused for months at a time.  As a result, 
both have dead batteries, so are not useful away from a wall socket.  I 
don't really feel like dropping a big pile of loot for yet another 
laptop that I probably won't use after the end of this contract, and 
which can't be upgraded.  Furthermore, I want to run Linux, and 
generally speaking Linux on a laptop still has lots of compromises
- desktop PC in the hotel room.  This is an option, but it'll take up 
lots of space and will be painful moving it into storage every weekend 
when I fly home.  Still, probably a more attractive option than a 
laptop.  On the home front, I'll cop some flak for buying "yet another" 
PC, which is a fair point

Then, in a flash of insight/stupidity, another option occurred to me. 
An X-Box with a mod chip!  It'll run Mandrake; it's cheap; it'll be 
useful when I bring it home for the kids to play games on, and as a 
MP3/Ogg/PVR player; it's small enough that I'll be able to ask the hotel 
staff to look after it on weekends; it'll probably plug into the hotel 
room's TV, so no monitor to contend with; I've already got lots of 
unused USB bits (keyboard, LAN card, modem, mouse) so connectivity 
should be OK; it'll play all my Ogg files; it's a superficially silly 
enough idea to be attractive in its own right...

So, to the big question.  Has anyone tried running Zope on an X-Box? 
No? - well that doesn't surprise me...  I realise it'll probably run, 
but what I'm really wondering is whether a 800MHz chip and 128Mb RAM is 
likely to be enough to get tolerable performance for a single user.  I'm 
using Postgres, which is a bit of a memory hog, but I could probably cut 
over to MySQL for dev purposes without any real pain.  Zope-wise, all I 
want to do is keep developing my existing project, so this box is never 
going to have more than one person using it; however, it would be nice 
to play some Oggs while I'm working...

Any opinions or suggestions welcome

Regards

Dave M.