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New FITPC 1 owner

Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2015 7:35 pm
by kristiaanb
So I was out at my local second hand sales on the weekend when i spotted a little box that said "FitPC" on the front I managed to buy it for £4.00 !

figuring that its either dead and I've wasted nothing or its working and the guy had no idea what he had so i brought it home and plugged it in and straight away it booted to grub asking to boot either Ubuntu or Gentoo.

so now i'm the proud owner of an old FitPC 1.0 box, i wanted to ask a few questions (i also appreciate its an obsolete box).

- How do i go about getting it to boot via USB stick (if its possible).

-Can someone let me know the default logins for Ubuntu and Gentoo as i get the feeling these may have never been changed.

- If they have been changed whats the best way to go about resetting the root login passwords for either distro?

is there a specif download I need to reinstall the OS on this box? i.e. does FitPC maintain its own build of ubuntu / gentoo for the FitPC's or can i just re-down ubuntu from the main site and re-install? if so what version is it?

- Whats the latest version of Linux i can get away with running on this device?

- Could someone point me in the direction of downloads to the latest and last driver sets for this machine (windows and Linux if possible) inc any bios updates that were available for it.

which output is for headphones and is that a modem port on the back or just a custom RS232 connector?

thanks for any help you guys can provide.

Re: New FITPC 1 owner

Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2015 4:38 am
by irads
Tips:
F2 during boot should invoke BIOS settings where you can choose boot order.

fit-PC1 is based on Compulab CM-iGLX / AMD Geode LX800. This may help in identifying compatible OS/drivers.

RAM is 256MB soldered on. HDD is IDE (not SATA).

Sorry I can't answer all your questions. The product is EOL for 8 years so support and resources are hard to come by.

Re: New FITPC 1 owner

Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2015 6:27 pm
by robho
I still have a Fit-PC 1 still running as my home server. It records TV via a USB DVB-T2 dongle and serves as a simple SSH / WWW / NFS / Samba / DLNA server. Recently I also set it to run RTL SDR so I can monitor 433 MHz transmissions.

But the limited CPU and memory is definitely starting to show :-) But I like my Fit-PC so I can accept that some things take some time :-)

To answer some of your questions:

* To boot via USB, enter BIOS and set boot device C: to "NAND flash".

* The latest BIOS is probably 5.2. During boot of Linux you will see:
[ 0.000000] DMI: CompuLab AMD "CM-iGLX" Geode LX/CS5536 /CM-iGLX Platform, BIOS Version 5.2 09/02/2007

* The latest Ubuntu release you can run is Ubuntu 12.04. After that release Ubuntu requires CPUs with PAE support (Geode doesn't have that). Ubuntu 12.04 is supported until 2017 though so you'll see security fixes until then.

If you're willing to compile your own kernel you can probably run later Ubuntu releases also. Just build a kernel without PAE.

You may also find other more recent Linux releases which you can run. Look for 32-bit distributions which don't require PAE.

* All hardware in the Fit-PC is supported by "standard Linux", so you don't need to download a Fit-PC specific Linux dist.

* On the back, the "modem port" is just a custom RS232 port.