[geeks] YASFFMB (Yet Another SFF Motherboard)

[Mark]

On 12 Nov 2007, at 17:32, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> Came across this on Directro.com website earlier today:
>
> http://directron.com/efika.html

You guys might be interested in my experience with the EFIKA:

http://lincsamiga.org.uk/wordpress/index.php/members-amigas/macmigas-efika/

I bought a board direct from Genesi in Texas when they were originally  
making them, and had it shipped to the UK (even with 56 USD shipping  
and import duty it w as still cheaper than UK dealer prices!!). I  
found the case in a local electronics store and thought 'YES!!'. After  
a lot of engineering and some interesting mods to the case we got it  
to fit in perfectly. I added a 50GB Seagate Momentus hard drive and a  
PicoATX PSU, plus a ATi Radeon 9250 AGP card (from a Genesi  
recommended dealer in Sweden). All packaged up it turned out to be a  
neat little rocket ship.

I am currently running Xubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon PPC on it but to be  
honest XFCE has it almost to the end of it's tether. It's really  
choking on it, with the lack of RAM and low-power CPU. I installed  
WindowMaker and started using that because it's SO much faster, and I  
always was a sucker for the NeXT Window Manager :).

It's no racing machine by any stretch, but it's silent and runs only  
moderately warm at best (mostly the gfx card - you can use a lower-fi  
Radeon if required to reduce this). If setup right it is rock-solid -  
I've had a best uptime of 21 days from it sitting running XChat 24/7.

Resources for installing Linux, and development on EFIKA can be found  
at:

http://www.powerdeveloper.org

>>> 44 pin IDE connector (2mm 90 degree port for connecting a 2.5 inch  
>>> notebook hard disk drive.)
>>
>> Note, this means that the only optical drive you can use is a USB  
>> 1.1 drive.
>
> Why? 44 pin to 40 pin IDE adapters are quite common and very  
> affordable - with this form-factor, an internal optical drive would  
> likely not be an option.

This is not a good idea. Apparently the ATA bus is single unit only  
(unbuffered maybe?) and people woh have tried to add a DVD drive and a  
hard drive have ended up with data loss and hard disk corruption.  
Remember this is an embedded system board by design, it's designed to  
either boot as a netboot client, or have a network install of an OS  
dropped on it and then be shut in a box.

Luckily the funkly froods over at PowerDeveloper have put in some very  
hard work and produced an Ubuntu NetInstall and Boot Kernel set for  
the EFIKA allowing it to run the latest version of Ubuntu (Gutsy  
Gibbon) and also install it from the internet over TCP/IP.

>> 2 x USB ports (1.1 automatic full speed/low speed recognition, OHCI).
>
> This board would feel a lot less limited if they had only used USB2.0
> high speed.


There is a new version of EFIKA slated for next year with USB 2.0 and  
onboard PowerVR graphics. It's at prototype stage atm. It uses a  
MPC5121e SoC chip with more up-to-date subsystems. I am praying for a  
SATA 150 header (there is a single SATA channel on the SoC) and real  
40-pin IDE :)

This is a system diagram of the developer board they are using - as  
you can see, the SoC chip has some cool stuff onboard :)

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2313/1568142129_4763684551_o.png

-- 
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://mdblog.68kmac.org>
68kMac.org:
<http://www.68kmac.org>
Visit my Homepage: <http://homepage.mac.com/markbenson>

"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."