Embedded image with VGA support ?

[df]

Hello everyone

I'm currently playing with pfsense-1.2-REL and an ALIX 3C3 board, which as you may know has a flaky console port, resulting in the embedded image to boot, but renders the box useless.

I'm using a compact flash at this time (since the bios on this board seems to fail with freebsd and microdrives), and the only way i could manage to boot pfsense was to perform a regular install from the .iso to the compact flash, using the uniprocessor kernel.

Now, we will all agree this is bad since by doing this, the filesystem is mounted RW, but at least, i get pfsense to boot up fine with VGA.

Thus the question, m0n0wall provides a "genric-pc" image with both serial and vga ..

Is there anyway to transform the existing embedded images to enable VGA support ?
Or
Is it possible to modify an existing FULL install, so it uses a ReadOnly filesystem and virtual /var & /tmp ?

By the way, since the Alix 3C3 only has one ethernet nic, i was abble to use a wireless card as LAN and that ethernet nic as WAN.
And yes, captiv portal on LAN works too in this setup, using stock 1.2-REL.

Keep up the excellent work on pfsense

Peace.

[GruensFroeschli]

What exactly do you mean with "the 3c3 has a flaky serial port"?
I have several of them and all work flawlessly.

Did you make sure that you've set the port-speed correctly?
Per default the ALIX has a speed of 38400 and pfSense 9600
–> The speed changes during bootup.

[df]

Well, from what i have tested, whenever i set the console redirection to on with 9600bps, i don't get any console output at all.
I have the same problem with every linux / *bsd i try on the 3C3's.

No problem at all with 2Cx ..

Even, in the setup previously described, if i check the enable console option in the webgui, when the box reboots, i loose VGA output past the bootloader and have nothing on the console.

Other users seem to have reported such issues on 3C3 only.

I've noticed a bios update on pcengine's site, trying to flash my board right now…

[df]

After upgrading the 3C3 bios, the concole now works fine with embedded image :)

Which returns me to question of my first post…

Is it possible to enable VGA out on the embedded image ..?

[GruensFroeschli]

I believe there is somewhere a thread around with a description how you can turn a full install into some kind of embedded.

If you use the search-function of the forum
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?action=search
and use the keywords "embedded full" you'll find this thread:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,6840.0.html

(hint: repeated use of the search function will lead to results ;) )