Well, the parts all arrived, and that is when the trouble started.
The first issue was that the pico power adapter unfortunately has 24 pins and the Mini ITX motherboard has 20 pins.
If it was the other way around, then all would still have been fine, but because there is a capacitor in the way on the motherboard, I cannot use this power module.
I had been hoping to avoid using a full size PSU for this project, hence why I went looking for a cheap alternative.
I could simply order another pico module that has 20 pins, but things will start to get costly as I would still need to buy a suitable power brick.
I think I will park this particular approach for some future PC build.
I went looking through my collection of power supplies and found a Mitac 200W PSU that happens to have a 20 pin connector.
This PSU came out of a Sun Ultra 5 that I scrapped a few years ago.
I have had a look inside the PSU and it can potentially be made much smaller if I just use the main board inside my enclosure (which I have yet to buy).
I installed the 1GB memory DIMM along with the 64MB memory module and the 512 CF card and booted it up.
Well this at least proves that the hardware all works as it booted to an Itona thin client desktop.
Next I downloaded the ISO from LinuxCNC and wrote it to a USB drive and booted up the motherboard again.
I swapped out the 64MB flash drive for the 512MB CF card and installed a 1GB CF card in the second adapter.
All was going well until I realised that I had nowhere near enough space available for the installation.
I found and read of the installation to CF document on the LinuxCNC Wiki where it stated that I would ideally need a 4GB card for the operating system install.
I had thought I was being a little optimistic with the cards I had initially decided to use, but even then I had been prepared to find some larger cards.
A few minutes on ebay later and I had ordered 2 x 4GB CF cards and a 16GB CF card all from the same seller for £18.00 ($28.00).
The cards arrived a few days later, they are all second hand, but as with any memory module, they work until they don’t and it matters not if they are new or second hand, they could stop working tomorrow, or they can work for years.
The next issues were all around the BIOS that had been installed on this thin client motherboard.
Firstly the BIOS is password protected, so if you want to change the boot order, or in my case disable all of the ACPI power saving options, you need the password.
I discovered on Martin de Reuver’s website that the default BIOS password for these boards is ‘drupad’.
The next issue was that the motherboard refused to even boot off the USB flash drive if there was a CF card bigger than 512MB in IDE1 – ‘HW not supported System Halt’.
I did manage to ‘trick’ the board into booting, by installing the 512MB CF card, then after the USB installer had kicked in, swapped it out for a 4GB card.
The install from the hybrid ISO image was straight forward enough and went without a hitch, however after the reboot I was back to ‘HW not supported System Halt’.
I installed the CF card in a USB card reader and hey presto it booted, so not an issue with the OS install, just with the motherboard itself.
I referenced the Parkytowers website again and noticed that issues had been found with the BIOS being ‘crippled’ and only allowing really small disks to boot from the IDE1.
I contacted David Parkinson who runs the site, and he suggested that I try using a smaller (100MB) /boot area.
This made sense, as older Linux releases were not comfortable with things like LVM disk manager for /boot and typically this would have been a separate file system.
Unfortunately, this did not fix the problem, as the motherboard still saw the the 4GB card and decided it was too big, this was not simply a partition size issue.
I decided that my only way forwards was going to be a BIOS upgrade.
i could not find any BOIS firmware on the VXL website referenced from Parkytowers, only thin client OS images, so I went looking for a more generic BIOS for this motherboard.
I found one on the Gigabyte website for the C7V7 motherboard and downloaded it, this is a self extracting archive that comes with the awdflash firmware installer, the BIOS firmware and a text file showing what switches to use.