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.
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.
Don't think that you have to put the entire Linux kernel into the chip in the BIOS socket - you don't. You just need a bootloader (that's essentially what LinuxBIOS is) in the BIOS chip, and that loads your kernel from wherever you want - CF is a good choice for this type of application, unless you want to store Gbytes of MP3s and have a hard drive anyway? Depends on what your car PC application / purpose is.
Regards,
Antony.