Hello.
I finally bought the hardware I told you and installed gnewsense 3 with a custom linux-libre 2.6.34 : mainboard Asus M4A77TD-PRO http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=0AvsBb7WBZe2i9zK CPU AMD Phenom X4 910e stepping c3 AMD 770 AMD SB710 RAM 2 x 4Gb dual channel non-ECC G.Skill DDR3-1333 PC3 10666 F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL superio ITE IT8712F (clearly marked on the chip and detected) lan: RTL8112L audio VIA VT1708S
I've put a graphics card by MSI, Nvidia GeForce 8400GS passively cooled (no fan) on the PCIExpress 2.0 slot.
I'll attachs the lspci and superiotool r3125 outputs (versions from gNewSense) and flashrom 0.9.2 downloaded and compiled from release tarball.
Btw. The readme in flashrom 0.9.2 says to use make DESTDIR=/usr install if you don't want it in /usr/local, but this will install it in /usr/usr/local/sbin. To have it in /usr/sbin you need to run makePREFIX=/usr install. It's slightly confusing for me, I've had to look at the Makefile.
Now, the first thing I want to do is to buy spare flash chips. But I'm not sure what chips or where to buy them.
It's a socket with an eight pin chip (DIP-8?) (4 pins per side), roughly 5mm x 9mm I'd say it's by Macronix (and flashrom agrees). But I doubt about the specific model. The motherboard manual says "8Mb Flash ROM".
The letters on the chip are very small and there's some marking over them that keeps me from reading them all . I'll copy here what I can read (i mark the most dubious letters with ?). (top left is a logo MX)
- - - - -- -- - - = v = = = b09?714 = = = =
25L5???5PC-15G 3C153600 TAIWAN
Looking at catalogues from macronix I think 25L is the family (SPI serial flash) 5?? should be the size (I'm not sure how many digits are there, not even 100% sure it's a 5) ?5 would be normal, write protected, duplex,etc. PC might be the process ( xx micrometers), -15 would be frequency of 66 Mhz and G something about lead free or environmental regulations.
but flashrom says its a Macronix MX25L8005 . http://www.macronix.com/QuickPlace/hq/PageLibrary4825740B00298A3B.nsf/h_Inde...
Now, the question is should I buy some MX25L8005 ? (apparently its end of life is 2010-11-30, so it should be available, but where in small quantities ? )
According to http://www.macronix.com/QuickPlace/hq/PageLibrary4825740B00298A3B.nsf/h_Inde... maybe I could try Mx25L8006EPI-12G
Where do you get your spare EEPROMs ?
Thank you.