Arch Linux

CyRiX_BlAcK

Member

Registered: 2006-03-02

Posts: 35

PC104 Project

Hello lads, I happened to stumble upon a wee PC104 motherboard thats tiny, like the size of a CD case. Anyway its only got a 66Mhz CPU with 8Meg ram, so its gonna struggle whatever I do with it. I noticed I have a spare laptop hard-drive (about 900 meg) that plugs directly onto it and it sees it.

Its a funny old thing, all runs off a 5V single supply so it must have some shunt regulators or something to generate other voltages, but anyway back to the main subject....

The atual motherboard dont have a CDROM so I was thinking if I install arch BASE on the HDD then move it to the wee PC104 card, will it boot with only 8meg ram and 66mhz?

It has a wee ten pin IDC connector with a ribbon cable and a eathernet plug on the end, so I can get online to update etc.

I also have plugged into the stack a VGA card and its got a onboard PSU interface (also a ribbon cable to IDC connector).

It would be funny as hell if I could get basic arch running on it, so would the BASE download (if installed using another PC) boot?

Once I install SSH I could ditch the VGA card and have it stand alone and I could look into using a disk on chip (they got up to 8gig at the mo) and boot from that instead of the hard drive, then its a solid state drive linux wee machine that fits in your hand. Funny stuff!

Down the line I can get another network card ordered in (it plugs ontop of it) so I "could" use it as a firewall/router or something usefull.

You can get PC104 adsl cards, network cards, USB2 cards, vga cards, all sorts. Hell the newest PC104 motherboards have a 2gig AMD fitted, but I wanna use what I got.

So if you wanna get in on this wee project post ya comments here, ANY help is usefull.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: PC104 Project

Is it 686? If not, you can forget about Arch, and have a look at Lowarch instead.