linuxbios on cheaper motherboards

Jan Kok kok at surfbest.net
Fri Feb 13 16:10:01 CET 2004


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 at clustermatic.org
[mailto:linuxbios-admin at 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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