Well, my Kontron pITX-SP 1.6GHz board finally came. This is the souped up version of the 1.1GHz board that I evaluated in February. This version in addition to being clocked 500MHz faster also features a bootable microSD socket, and two SATA ports. Read on for more info about the board and getting debian up and running on it.
As is typical of everything in the embedded world getting an OS up on the board presented a few challenges. I knew that I wanted to run debian on the board, I just had to figure out how to get it installed on to the microSD card. I picked up a 4GB class 4 card for the purposes of loading the OS and evaluating the board. Since there was no optical disk drive connected that ruled out the typical route of burning a debian install image. I couldn’t find a USB flash drive that I could format that was of sufficient size to load the install image on to. That left me with the option of putting the install image on a CF card using a USB CF card reader. Then, I booted the system with this drive and everything worked as though it would have with a USB flash drive. The only downside was the slow speed of the older CF card.
The install appeared to be going great, I got everything setup and I was ready for a reboot. So, I rebooted the system and I got nothing. Well technically I got the word “grub” printed on the screen and that was it. Thinking I had dorked something up I re-installed again, double checking everything. Same result! So, I decided to disconnect the USB CF card reader and try to boot up that way. Now I got even less! Just a flashing cursor. This told me that GRUB had some how gotten dorked up. So, I rewrote the installer image to CF card and booted up in rescue mode. I mounted my /boot partition by issuing mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot. I looked at /boot/grub/device.map and I saw my problem immediately. My device.map read:
(hd0) /dev/sda (hd1) /dev/mmcblk0
It was thinking that /dev/sda was my first disk, and that mmcblk0 was my second. It installed the MBR on /dev/sda (which is what was screwing up my CF card after the install), but didn’t create a partition for /boot. Which is why I only got “GRUB” on my screen. So, I changed the device map to reflect the true state of my system, and re-did a grub-install specifying the device map. Rebooted the system and I got a grub menu as I expected but still couldn’t boot! The grub menu was still pointing to (hd1) for the kernel image. A quick edit of the boot parameters and I was booting.
After a bit of frustration everything is up and going. So, now it is time to get my packages installed and make sure I can run the embedded app on this board! I’ll post some more benchmarks at a later date. I am expecting good performance given what I saw with the 1.1GHz board.
I only recently ‘discovered’ this motherboard, and thus I’m interested in knowing what you accomplished with it. I’m not a programmer or skilled techie per se, but if I’m able to purchase one from Kontron or other source, I plan on using NetBSD with Openbox window manager. (That should prove interesting, given that I’ve only used WINDBLOWS and OS X to date.)
I would love to read any other experiences you had with the motherboard.
P.S. I recently contacted Kontron about purchasing one of these motherboards, but they have not contacted me. Do you know of other sales channels?
We have been using the board for processing data for real-time 3D surveying system. All of our software runs from a linux console with no direct user interface. It’s a quite nice board for embedded purposes, however it wouldn’t be a good desktop system. It has a rather anemic 1.6GHz Atom processor.
Avnet is our distributor for Kontron. They are quite responsive. I would note that the 1.6GHz version of this board is still undergoing engineering finalization so it is hard to come by.