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J M E
J M E New Member Posts: 11 ✭
in Unboxing & Project Sharing
Ordered a 4/32 version which shipped to the UK 9 days later. At the time the store had 3 week delivery times. Nice to have early fulfilment.

First sight of the board itself pretty positive, looks very well made, sensible heat-sinking etc. Power supply might be an issue for some, I was lucky to have a 5v4a PSU for an ARM board with the right sized barrel connector. I used the UP with one of those tiny 7" TFT monitors connected directly via HDMI which gave me a very basic BIOS setup on first boot. All good so far.

Next step: Install Windows 10 ... At which point the problems kicked in. I used Rufus to transfer the ISO image to a USB drive. Once the UP booted it kept dropping me into a UEFI shell. All attempts to mount the USB drive failed, with the shell claiming no file system existed. After verifying the USB drive wouid boot on an Intel equipped Asrock mini-ITX board I gave up on Windows 10.

On then to Ubilinux. Same routine, used Rufus to transfer the ISO image to the same USB stick. This time the board did boot into the Ubilinux setup as expected. Sadly though the installation itself failed, claiming it could not detect any network hardware ... consternation. No network hardware ??? I had noted some comments in the forum about boot capabilities and had seen the announcement of a new BIOS which supported PXE boot. Excellent, I thought. I'll try that out and see if it improves matters.

Given the issues so far with installing from USB sticks I was very happy to see the BIOS upgrade work without a hitch. Oddly it took 3 or 4 reboots before the BIOS was itself convinced it had been set up correctly but eventually I was able to retry UbiLinux installation (once I had discovered F7 was the key to selecting the boot media). UbiLinux promptly failed at the 'cannot detected network hardware' stage. Bah. Singularly unimpressed by this stage. What to do?

Now I could continue to bore you to death with this steadily sorrier story. Or I could just explain that at some later point in time I discovered the network interfaces were disabled in the BIOS - the settings are hidden away in the 'Advanced >> Network Stack Configuration' options. Why on earth would this be the default on such a device? Madness. Inexplicable. Let's retry Ubilinux. No dice. It fails at the same point. My bah has now turned to grrr.

Time for a vanilla Ubuntu Mate 16.01 x64 distribution. Loaded it onto the USB stick, you'll never guess how! Select the USB stick via the F7 boot options menu and hey, presto, voila! The installation begins, continues, then completes. Reboot and up comes the desktop. Just as you'd expect it to. Right from the start.

TL;DR:

1. Make sure you've got a decent (2A+ 5V) PSU with the correct jack.
2. Flash the latest BIOS before you do anything else. I opted for the 64 bit version.
3. Verify the network stack is enabled!
4. Install a stock* 64bit Ubuntu if you've got 4GB of RAM, probably use the 32bit release on 2GB.

* I realize this means you cannot access the GPIO module etc but that it is a really simple kernel modules, easily built and installed once the right tooling is on-board.

At some point I will retry the Windows 10 installation and will post if I get different results.
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  • DCleri
    DCleri Administrator, AAEON Posts: 1,213 admin
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    Hi g40,

    Thank you for your very valuable feedback and I am sorry if you found issues while installing Windows and ubilinux on your board.

    Now to start with your problems on the Windows installation I strongly suggest to use the documentation provided from this link:

    There you can see that you should use the Microsoft Windows Media Creation Tool which will prepare a UEFI USB Windows 10 installer. The board only supports UEFI boot, so it is important you boot image has UEFI support.

    Before going to ubilinux I would like to clarify the Network option for PXE boot which comes disable by default. This options is not required to enable the Ethernet port but only to enable Network boot (via PXE), which is not used by a normal installation of any OS. You are fine to leave that option disable then.

    About your problems with ubilinux installation I would like to ask you few questions. We have extensively tested the installation procedure with and without the network (wired or wireless) and also via serial console.

    [ul]
    [li]Is your board connected to a wired or wireless network before you start the installation process? If it is connected, try to remove the cable to see if the behavior changes...[/li]
    [li]Have you followed the steps provided in our Wiki to download, prepare and install ubilinux? [/li]
    [li]You can check out our installation tutorial from here: https://up-community.org/wiki/Installing_ubilinux[/li]
    [/ul]

    In that tutorial is specified how to access the boot menu "When you see the UP logo, press F7 to open the boot menu" and other useful information for the first time install. Please let us know if it is not clear enough or you may have any other suggestions.


    Also if you want to stick with Ubuntu, you can download the UP Board specific kernel from our PPA repository on Launchpad, which includes all the necessary changes to support the 40-pin header, hdmi audio, etc.
    You can check out more from our wiki: https://up-community.org/wiki/Ubuntu


    Again thanks for your feedback and please let us know if you succeed to resolve any of the issues you are experiencing.
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  • J M E
    J M E New Member Posts: 11 ✭
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    Hello again.

    To clarify:

    The USB stick for the Windows installer was set up as UEFI boot. The (not updated) BIOS simply refused to recognise the file system on it. I could mount from the UEIF shell but not access the FS.

    Network stack:

    This is odd. I have installed (literally) hundreds of copies of Linux on both ARM and x86 dev kits. Never has one failed to find the network hardware. The connection is (and always is) wired until installation is known good, also always plugged from powerup.

    I should add that during the UbiLinux installation attempts, the installer also reported that the USB drive needed remounting. Which is something I've never ever seen. Switching the stick to another USB2 socket did the trick. So I am very skeptical about Ubi at the moment.

    As far as the BIOS network stack settings only enabling PXE boot, then that is reasonable, *if* you document it in an easy to find place!

    I am in the middle of a kernel rebuild at the moment but once completed will retry the network settings and pinging from the UEFI shell (if this is supported by AMI). I will let you know.

    So far 16.01 has worked very well, I will add the PPA link and check out the GPIO capabilities.

    Thanks again for listening.

    Jerry.
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  • Korneliusz
    Korneliusz New Member Posts: 24 ✭
    edited September 2016
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    i made bootable UEFI USB image with UEFI shell - may be help: http://www.jarzebski.pl/files/upboard/usbuefiboot.img.bz2
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  • Gary Blake
    Gary Blake New Member Posts: 18 ✭
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    Windows installs correctly when you set the right configuration in rufus as the documents specify. I had the same problem before i got the correct settings. Watch out for rufus as it will default the settings as you go through so you have to reselect them!
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