Tiny Computer with Printer port

Hi Thomas

When you remember last year when you helped me we had same issue

How could I forget, another saga longer than Beowulf!

I doubt that all 3 cards are defective, but you are right the answer is to get a card which does work.
I suspect that CF card technology has outstripped the NCBOX, hopefully I will find out definitively eventually.

regards

Hi,
that with beowulf was not nice - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf
But i do have 2 working CF cards ,..
So yes the NCbox has that back draw but on the other hand it works very well.
Only thing it only works on the 8.04 installation ok (i wanted to put an Touchscreen on it this i did not do successful.

but thanks for the help anyway
thomas

that with beowulf was not nice - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf

A tongue-in-cheek remark rather than any direct allegory I assure you.

Only thing it only works on the 8.04 installation ok (i wanted to put an Touchscreen on it this i did not do successful.

When I get my new card, I will have a look at building an image using my UP build of 3.5.7-rtai on Debian

It works on P4s just great, so should work with this. It would have all the driver support for touch screens etc

No promises, it might be too heavy, I had to add a graphics card to the P4s to get the graphics overhead off the RAM and CPU and get latency right back down again

regards

Hi,
Well I finally received my new CF card, a Kingston 266X 16GB card.

I went through the usual steps and for some reason it took a few goes to get the operating system onto the CF hard. The attached screen shot shows the terminal. After each failure I entered Gparted and deleted the partition and reformated. I was going to set it to 2 partitions, but figured I could do that later if I wanted. So the last DD looks like it got it. 5.3GB transferred records in = records out, OK all good took around 30mins.

Took it and plugged it in to the NCBox and booted into the Bios and it sees the card in the CF slot. Allowing it to continue to boot I was greeted with the same "Missing operating system" message.

For reference I decided to plug the CF into the USB card reader, and plugged it into the USB port on the NCbox. REbooting the NCbox it detects 4 USB devices, but it does not see the card. Entering the BIOS it is quite happy to use the USB as boot devices, but again no such luck is seeing a card inside the reader. It also just gave the "Missing operating system" message.

I've checked the BIOS settings to be the same as in a previous post, so its not those.

Anything seem wrong in the screen shot, any other tips?
Cheers
Colin

Since found that my USB port is rather touchy and worn, so that explains the 3 attempts.

DDed the image over to a USB, and it to is not bootable. Is there a step I am missing? Or is my img corrupt?

USB was formated to ext2 as well, and set to boot on the flags. Seems like the boot loader aka grub or such like is missing.

Hi

There is something wrong with the bootloader not being written to MBR, but unless you can re-install GRUB, that is probably it.
(from a system running 8.04 with the card in a reader, install grub and specify to install to the card MBR and give the card /boot directory as the location of the grub files)

I have withdrawn the image, I don't have time to support it, I don't use the NCBOX for anything now, sorry.

The original instructions are back up on my site at mgware.co.uk/CNC

These are what I did to install in the first place, there are also Thomas's notes of what he did to achieve the same.

Regards CF cards

I had an answer regards the problems with the Lexar cards etc and it is this.

There is a bit which needs to be set on the CF card to enable it to be booted from.
As camera card manufacturers would not think anyone would want to boot from the card, they don't set it and they will not work.
Apparantly RoBoard have also had lots of problems with similar scenarios

So the answer appears to be forget the speed, get a general purpose one not a camera card.

Thomas had all sorts of problems initially with his card as he said and it was all because it was intended for cameras

Arceye, thank you helpful as always. I see mgware have also killed off the main download for now as well with the mirror surviving for now.

Managed to get both the CF cards I have, the 400x and 266x booting into puppy with EMC using Unetbootin. Seems something is going on with the img file and dd ing. Can't say I can find out what, and out of my depth. As you say probably the setting of something which is not well documented, but Unetbootin works so long as you have an iso.

Not sure if an ISO can be released that would remove the dd ing instead of an img. Seems the dd ing does not set the CF up right.

Its a patch for now. Can't upgrade this version so.... back to the drawing board and off to find something which I can upgrade......thanks for the support.

hi,
i also had troubles but then i found an hardware piece which works.
I can see which fabricate it is
Arceye was very helpful and did explain how to build the cf from scratch
so i have now 2 versions 8.04 which are ok one of the iso and another build from scratch

because i need ATC support with remap i have only use for the Ncbox in my over next project -
But if you plan to build an actual 2.6 or so version on the cf card for the ncbox i would be interested.
so let me know if i can help
thomas

Well things are progressing with the NCBOX, but I'm not quite there.....
My NCBOX now boots from the CF.....YAY! I downloaded all the files and instructions...
I did the ./stage1 and it went through a big list of stuff which I'm not going to post here, cause there were no errors. After ./stage1 was complete I restarted, and selected the Vortex Kernal option.
I then performed the ./stage2, some errors came up, and it appears that the NCBOX network connection was not working as it was the apt-get lines that had problems. hmmmm So after much mucking around I see that my cable was dodgey , and now I have replaced it the connection is good. In fact I am typing this in from the NCBOX on the net. Problem is now in the terminal, set as root, when I type in ./stage2 it says;
root@CNC:/usr/src# ./stage2
bash: ./stage2: Permission denied
I tried removing this and extracting it from the zip file again, but alas no change on this.
Being as it had run once, although not correctly, I thought I would soldier on. I've updated LinuxCNC to version 2.5. Although it will not run in the Vortex Kernal, but it does run if I restart and select the old kernal. So success of a kind. I am guessing but ./stage2 takes care of letting linuxcnc accept the new kernal?
So any reason why I can't run ./stage2 again? Things were progressing rather nicely until then.....

So any reason why I can't run ./stage2 again? Things were progressing rather nicely until then.....

Zipping files very often clobbers the file attributes, try running chmod 755 stage2 in a terminal as root.

If that fails for some reason, you can always just open the script in an editor an cut and paste the lines into a terminal and execute them.
( Ctrl C to copy, Shift Insert to paste into the terminal )

regards