[LinuxBIOS] YEAH! EPIA WORKS!

Jun OKAJIMA okajima at digitalinfra.co.jp
Sun Jul 24 05:33:53 CEST 2005


Hello all guys here.

Finally, the very foolish guy in Tokyo has succeeded to run
LX2 on my EPIA M/B. Thank you all. Thanks for all helps. Thank you!!!.

But, of course, there are problems and questions.

---------------
first, the biggest issue is, DIMMs are really picky. The M/B
is natively picky, I mean, even with Award BIOS, it is picky.
but the problem is much more serious with LX2.
I tested with two EPIA M/B and 5 DIMMs which all
are confirmed to work well with Award BIOS. And the result
is too much great. Only one combination worked in these
10 combinations. Guys, can you help?

I think that one solution is hard coding the params of mem
in a BIOS image. But, how?

--------------
The second issue is, booting time. It is very fast before
a kernel loaded, but after this, there are three glitches.
I know at least two of them are not LX2 issue, but I hope any advice.

1. Just after "Jumping to entry point...".
Probably this waiting is caused by "Uncompressing Linux kernel",
but it is much slower than normal booting. Takes about 2 sec.

2. 
   "Console: colour dummy device 80x25
         <---- here.
    Memory: 128128k/131072k available"
This comes from memory checking? It takes about 1 sec.

3. IDE recognizing.
   I added "ide0=0x1f0,0x3f6,14 ide1=noprobe", but it takes about 2 secs.


---------------
The third issue is, VGA.
I read the FreeVGA paper. Yes, it seems great.
But such complicated technology is really necessary?
For example, this guy succeeded to use normal VGA bios, although I failed.
http://www.carbotpc.com/linux/index.html
Or, just using Xfree86 driver doesnt work?



                              --- Okajima, Jun. Tokyo, Japan.








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