On Monday 12 April 2004 12:57 pm, Ignacio Verona wrote:
hi! This is my first post. I'm trying to develop my own Car PC and using LinuxBios I hope to get faster boot times. I'm using a Via EPIA M-II 10000. What are the first steps I should take?
Search the archives to see if anyone else has built LinuxBIOS for that board; if not, check your chipset with lspci and see if someone has got that chipset working on a different board.
I also have an EPIA MII, though it is the fanless 6000. I have successfully installed LinuxBIOS and it is loading etherboot (verified by looking at the serial output and my dhcp server log). I'm currently stuck getting an etherboot image that works, but I'm sure I'll get past that soon.
I basically followed the epia howto but used via/epia-m as the mainboard in my config file. I also used the exact version of etherboot as the howto even though there are much newer versions.
The epia bios is socketed on 32-lead PLCC format. What is the biggest rom size I could get? It is possible to use DOC on this motherboard (may be, I could fit a usable linux system on... less than 64mb).
64Mbytes for a usable Linux system is not a challenge.
Rather than thinking of DoC, you'd be better of using Compact Flash. If your motherboard doesn't have a CF socket directly, you can use a simple (and cheap) CF-IDE adapter and put the CF where the HDD normally connects.
The MII does come with an onboard CF slot (and pcmcia slot) but I believe it is connected via cardbus; it does not present itself as an ide device - standard bios cannot boot from it. You might be able to get that adapter working using yenta socket driver, etc., but it is probably a lot easier to get an CF-IDE adapter working first. You probably want to use FILO instead of etherboot too, but I'm not sure about that. I'm still very much a LinuxBIOS newbie too.
Good Luck! And make sure you get a Bios Savior!
Larry