Back to Linux

It has been awhile sinced I posted on this.  My wife and I have been travelling and other projects have been sandwiched in between (like a whole diversion into circuit building and green energy, etc.).  Anyway, I am back to hacking processor boards for robot integration. I am blogging about this because it may help others who may have hit stumbling blocks with a certain board for something seemingly simple as getting it to boot a fairly recent Linux kernel.  In the end, and looking back, it might have been easier to use another board afterall!  The board I am referring to is the Vortex86SX.  On paper, it sounds like a packed board, and indeed the DX version is already marketed as a “roboard” for robot building.  But, sometimes the fun is in the challenge and learning experience.  I also picked up the board on EBay for about $70.  It has all kinds of I/O and a regular VGA port and 2 hi-speed USB ports and runs only on 5v.  The problem…….no math coprocessor.  Pretty much cripples it with most OSs.  You can forget WinXP (even embedded version).  Win2K is just too old for getting current drivers.  It looks like Linux is the only way to go here.

It came with X-Linux which works, but the kernel is just old enough so most drivers are not rolled into it.  It seems to have lacked good ceveloper following.  For basic operation and if you want to brew your own drivers, it should be fine.  I wanted a little more main streamso I can get current apps and drivers.  First I started with SliTaz, which works great on my other 386 PC104 board, but it panics because of no FPU.  Then I really wanted Puppy Linux, but recompiling the kernel was tedious and threw all kinds of errors in my multiple attempts, just to get it going with no FPU.  I read another forum where someone had tried for weeks and got it to boot, but then had multiple failures to get a GUI working like X-Windows.  But I found another blog which solved my issues (http://choompon.exteen.com/20100128/howto-compile-debian-for-e-box-2300-sx).

My steps:

  • Downloaded the image (USB flash), which is way faster than recompiling on my own
  • using Puppy Live on my PC (or any other Linux variant)  I dd’ed the img file to a 256M thumb drive
  • using gparted, I set the boot flag of thumb drive
  • tested drive by booting to Linux on PC
  • put that thumb drive and CFlash IDE board (with 512M flash) onto Vortex board
  • booted Vortex board to USB thumb Linux
  • dd’ed partition of thumb to CFlash partition ( sda1 to hda1)
  • rebooted without thumb (Linux debian ‘Lenny’ comes up)

All is good!  I have a working PC104 board with lots of I/O, and the main reason……I plugged in my webcam (seen on previous posts moving with servors), and it recognized it.  It showed the sound portion of cam, which is a good start.  The next major thing I had to do was get the system to be ‘not live’, as the flash drive is essentially emulating a live cd system where the flash drive is like the cd.   I wanted to have apps and settings remain persistent.  This was accomplished by getting a bigger CFlash card (4G) and setting up partitions with gparted.  Partition 1 was 256M Fat32, 1 was 900M Ext3, and rest was Ext2.  I set boot flag to first partition and made it bootable with ‘syslinux’, which I think is way easier than Grub (no hd0’s vs hd1’s to worry about).  Made syslinux.cfg to boot with ‘rw root=/dev/hda2’ which made the second partition function as normal system.  Then I mounted the ‘live’ root system image as a new drive on /media directory, using “-o loop” at end.  Then while logged in as ‘root’, I cp’ed all the directories to the second partition (many are emtpy like /proc).  So now I had a huge user space with standard boot from fat32.

After putting new CFlash drive in board and rebooting, I had Debian system running on a writable partition and ready for app/driver installs.  By the way, the LAN port worked with kernel image, so using apt-get worked great after tweaking source tree and adding a few more like the archived builds from debian.org.  I had to setup network by editing the “interfaces” file – I used “auto eth0 inet dhcp” to get me going, then did network reset.