Newbie with epia M-II

Antony Stone Antony at Soft-Solutions.co.uk
Mon Apr 12 07:30:00 CEST 2004


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.

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