Hello Fellows,
I have been using linuxbios for a while on some products of my company, we make pc-based jukeboxes and arcade machines for pubs and public venues and I have been using linuxbios and DOC to make a fast boot and prevent the computer to hang at boot when CMOS clears, and to store some information on DOC and prevent hard disk corruption problems. We also have busybox on DOC, so we can verify problems and provide maintenance even when HD fails.
We used pcchips M810 (red motherboard) and ECS K7SEM (purple). We used this board mainly because it was the cheapest and worked fine with linuxbios. Now this motherboards are impossible to find on retailers and SDRAM modules are becoming scarce. I have seen that EPIA is being actively developed but EPIA is not really easy to find and cheap (at least in south america), also its CPU is not the best performance.
I was thinking of using PCCHIPS m810D (SIS 740, closer to SIS730) but its PLCC BIOS is soldered onboard! So I had to switch to ASROCK K7VM2 (via KM266), and we could afford donnate $400 and this motherboard plus cpu and memory, to a developer that could make linuxbios work on this board (with sound, eth0, framebuffer, IDE and serial port working). Its a very small reward, but maybe it will help any developer that is already working on it.
thanks for the attention
You might want to consider the ECS K7S5A--It uses a SiS735 chipset. It is also compatible with both DDR SDRAM and normal SDRAM, but I am not sure if anybody has tried this using DDR SDRAM on the SiS73x series boards with LinuxBIOS yet.
On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Andre Dias wrote:
Andre, what is your schedule? How long can you wait for a solution?
All,
Some of the Disks On Chips are now available in a "FBGA 69-ball (9x12mm)". Would any of these work, electrically? If so, is there a FBGA to PLCC adapter available anywhere? If there is not an adapter available, someone on the Homebrew_PCBs Yahoo group might be able to come up with an adapter and produce them in a moderate quantity for use by people in this group. I know someone who can assemble BGAs onto boards.
That approach would allow using DOC on a wider range of modern motherboards.
Cheers, - Jan
-----Original Message----- From: linuxbios-admin@clustermatic.org [mailto:linuxbios-admin@clustermatic.org] On Behalf Of Andre Dias Sent: Friday, February 13, 2004 12:12 PM To: Linux BIOS List Subject: linuxbios on cheaper motherboards
Hello Fellows,
I have been using linuxbios for a while on some products of my company, we make pc-based jukeboxes and arcade machines for pubs and public venues and I have been using linuxbios and DOC to make a fast boot and prevent the computer to hang at boot when CMOS clears, and to store some information on DOC and prevent hard disk corruption problems. We also have busybox on DOC, so we can verify problems and provide maintenance even when HD fails.
We used pcchips M810 (red motherboard) and ECS K7SEM (purple). We used this board mainly because it was the cheapest and worked fine with linuxbios. Now this motherboards are impossible to find on retailers and SDRAM modules are becoming scarce. I have seen that EPIA is being actively developed but EPIA is not really easy to find and cheap (at least in south america), also its CPU is not the best performance.
I was thinking of using PCCHIPS m810D (SIS 740, closer to SIS730) but its PLCC BIOS is soldered onboard! So I had to switch to ASROCK K7VM2 (via KM266), and we could afford donnate $400 and this motherboard plus cpu and memory, to a developer that could make linuxbios work on this board (with sound, eth0, framebuffer, IDE and serial port working). Its a very small reward, but maybe it will help any developer that is already working on it.
thanks for the attention
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On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Jan Kok wrote:
That approach would allow using DOC on a wider range of modern motherboards.
A bigger limitation than packaging for DoC has been M-systems. They have an attitude about open source that is hard to fathom and seems to change weekly, which makes it difficult to commit to using their parts -- if you commit, you don't know if they will make the next part open or not.
I think you're much better off with an adapter for compact flash. That's an open, widely used standard which has worked well for us.
ron
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Andre Dias -
Hendricks David W. -
Jan Kok -
ron minnich