Post by synthaxx on May 5, 2010 23:47:22 GMT 7
DISCLAIMER: following any of these steps could end existence as we know it.
If you blow anything up you can't hold me responsible (although i would like some pictures ;D ).
Proceed at your own risk.
So after living with the N5200 for a while i started to run into some problems with the onboard OS. Sure it runs a chroot perfectly well, and mine ran debian. But some of the things i wanted (drivers, full transcoding of video streams etc.) were just too much work to get compiled, tested and running.
After having received a laptop with a thoroughly broken graphics card and seeing that it had a SL7SA onboard i found this post and thought that maybe running a full debian (ubuntu server in my case). on here would be the way to go.
After replacing the CPU however the system would not boot with my 1gb DDR stick so i was stuck with just 512 salvaged from an old system.
Having ordered a 4gb Transcend DOM i carefully made a bootable usb stick that reported the whole installation process back via serial (add "console=ttyS0" in the boot parameters if anyone's interested). Unfortunately due to a bug in ubuntu server 10.04 it wouldn't boot after about 3 reboots.
Now stuck with a non responsive N5200, and no way to check what the hell was going on i had 2 options left since it won't boot off usb once there's an actual system on the DOM:
-solder on a vga header: i make it a point to not inflict my soldering skills onto anything i can't miss. More often than not it goes horribly wrong.
-boot the DOM using another system: turns out a gender changer for a female 44 pin harddrive won't do the trick because the pinouts are reversed, and ordering a suitable cable was fraught with problems of non-availability.
Enter Josh Lebo's brilliant solution.
Just take VGA extension cable, rip off the metal surroundings and stick it straight through the motherboard. No soldering needed. Here is mine:
And on the board:
Note that the paper is there to not have it touch any other components.
This whole thing let me install the OS and test it before closing her back up.
Browsing the BIOS also led me upon a very interesting option:
The standard setting of "Auto Max 266MHz" would not let the processor boot at full speed with the 1gb stick. But setting it to the selected option above would! All the others mess up the graphics card to such an extent that i don't really want to let it run like that for fear of blowing something up.
So there you have it. A fully functional, 1.73GHz, 1GB, 10TB, 25watt idle debian server.
Thing of beauty
If you blow anything up you can't hold me responsible (although i would like some pictures ;D ).
Proceed at your own risk.
So after living with the N5200 for a while i started to run into some problems with the onboard OS. Sure it runs a chroot perfectly well, and mine ran debian. But some of the things i wanted (drivers, full transcoding of video streams etc.) were just too much work to get compiled, tested and running.
After having received a laptop with a thoroughly broken graphics card and seeing that it had a SL7SA onboard i found this post and thought that maybe running a full debian (ubuntu server in my case). on here would be the way to go.
After replacing the CPU however the system would not boot with my 1gb DDR stick so i was stuck with just 512 salvaged from an old system.
Having ordered a 4gb Transcend DOM i carefully made a bootable usb stick that reported the whole installation process back via serial (add "console=ttyS0" in the boot parameters if anyone's interested). Unfortunately due to a bug in ubuntu server 10.04 it wouldn't boot after about 3 reboots.
Now stuck with a non responsive N5200, and no way to check what the hell was going on i had 2 options left since it won't boot off usb once there's an actual system on the DOM:
-solder on a vga header: i make it a point to not inflict my soldering skills onto anything i can't miss. More often than not it goes horribly wrong.
-boot the DOM using another system: turns out a gender changer for a female 44 pin harddrive won't do the trick because the pinouts are reversed, and ordering a suitable cable was fraught with problems of non-availability.
Enter Josh Lebo's brilliant solution.
Just take VGA extension cable, rip off the metal surroundings and stick it straight through the motherboard. No soldering needed. Here is mine:
And on the board:
Note that the paper is there to not have it touch any other components.
This whole thing let me install the OS and test it before closing her back up.
Browsing the BIOS also led me upon a very interesting option:
The standard setting of "Auto Max 266MHz" would not let the processor boot at full speed with the 1gb stick. But setting it to the selected option above would! All the others mess up the graphics card to such an extent that i don't really want to let it run like that for fear of blowing something up.
So there you have it. A fully functional, 1.73GHz, 1GB, 10TB, 25watt idle debian server.
Thing of beauty
