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.