Well now that the Raspberry Pi is running and I actually understand it somewhat, its time to move on to the Fit PC-2i that I’ve had in the closet.
We got it running a build of routing software but since then I’ve been failing and failing. It has a 120GB SSD in it and a 2GHz Atom processor, so it is way more powerful than the Raspberry Pi, but its really strange on installing software particularly if you just have a Mac. Here are some guides to getting it to work.
The big problem is that it uses Intel’s GMA500 and it is so hard to find good drivers for it. That seems to be the main problem.
- OpenElec. I’ve completely failed on this. This is supposed to be a closed build of MythTV. My Mac Mini is right now down. It won’t start MySQL for some reason with the new MacPorts version of MythTV. I haven’t had time to debug it. But when I try to use OpenElec, it doesn’t seem to want to start at all.
- OpenBSD. OK, I admit it I don’t understand the setup, it is pretty obscure. So I need to give this a try.
- Windows 7. I finally have fallen back to Windows 7. It wouldn’t install and then I remembered in the BIOS that I disabled booting from the SSD. Oops! The big trick is figuring out how to get Windows 7 onto a USB stick. I downloaded the ISO for Windows 7 and then used the Mac version of Unetbootin to create a bootable USB. Amazingly this actually worked. The only confusing part is that when you go through the install, Windows reboots and is not smart enough to tell you to take the USB key out, so it seems like the install fails. The solution is to watch the install and when it reboots yank the USB so it will boot from the SSD.
- Ubuntu. This nearly works, but again the driver issues mean it doesn’t boot from a USB properly. When you do an install it nearly works but when it boot, the graphics driver goes blank. Argh!
