Why Alix board is nice and why not quite

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 by Marcin Juszkiewicz

There are nice things in Alix board design and few not quite nice.

Nice ones:

  • only 12V voltage needed (small external PSU is in package)
  • DC-DC converter on board (so no need for ATX PSU or PicoPSU + 12V external PSU)
  • slot for CompactFlash storage on board (no need for CF->ATA adapter)
  • miniPCI slot
  • low profile (board has height of dual USB connector)
  • 22 GPIO lines
  • 256MB of RAM soldered on board (so no space taken by memory slot)
  • no fan, no heatsink

What I do not like:

  • lack of ATX back cover for ports (so when you put it in case you will get big hole for dust)
  • lack of memory slot (even SO-DIMM one if someone want more then 256MB RAM)
  • ATA connector is 44 pin one for 2.5″ harddisks (looks like it is impossible to buy 2.5″->2.5″ cable in Poland)

So if someone know where to buy 2.5″ -> 2.5″ ATA cable in Poland then please write in comment.



Tags: 2 Comments »

PC Engines Alix1c arrived

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 by Marcin Juszkiewicz

During GUADEC time Stelios Koroneos from Digital Opsis announced that PC Engines company donated two Alix1c boards to OpenEmbedded. As the board is interesting I wrote that if no one else will mail than I would like to play with it.

Today it picked it on post office and brought home. First reaction during unpacking: “Wow, this board is TINY!” because I had not used mini-ITX boards before. After connecting few cables (power, ethernet, vga, usb keyboard) and shorting “power switch” with screwdriver I got it booted and checked BIOS settings. Unfortunately I was unable to boot from PXE :(

I did search in drawer and took 256M CompactFlash card which I bought few years ago for “collie” and decided to install something on it. Decided that this time it will be Voyage Linux (Debian derived distribution for x86-based embedded platforms such as WRAP, ALIX and Soekris 45xx/48xx boards). Fetched their install CD (33M only) and started qemu with CF card as harddisk and that ISO. Few minutes later card was put into slot on Alix board and I got Voyage running.

Of course I could not resist and now board is upgraded to plain Debian ’sid’ and 2.6.22 kernel ;D After wedding I will replace NSLU2 with Alix board and add few functions for it:

  • Samba server
  • Bluetooth Access Point
  • CUPS based print server
  • NFS server

During that time I also plan to move it from CF card and Debian to 2.5″ harddisk and Ångström.



Tags: 2 Comments »