Minnowboard Turbot
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Got my MBM Turbot today and it boots to an EFI shell. Looks good with a usable bios. I was afraid the SPI Firmware flasher was needed but it is not. I skipped buying that item but got the rest of the accessories including top and bottom expansion boards. Everything fit well and the board itself feels good. You can tell by the chip density they packed a lot on the little board. The bios battery is not included and it takes an CR1225 battery. I am debating on Arch or FreeBSD for usage.
I bought a cheap 24GB mSATA SSD for the bottom expansion lure. HDMI output works good and is via microHDMI connector.
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I tried to get pfSense working but there are no UEFI images I am aware of. I might have to try Nas4Free/FreeNAS.. I Need to checkout the console mode as well. Some boot-screens don't show up on HDMI as it initializes later and they will show on UART/TTL connection.
The bios looks good as I was worried it was some rudimentary bios. It is not. Looks similar to many Intel bios screen layout.
The SPI programmer allows you to flash other firmwares to it. I believe there is even a EFI 32 bit version firmware.
I see no need to change what ships. It looks and works good.
I used Rufus to format thumbdrives with GPT for UEFI usage. Many of my thumbdrives would not boot on it.
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Happy new year!
I was also looking for this small board as a network helper appliance, WLAN AP or only to play around with it.
It brings you more capabilities then an RaspBerry PI based on the Lure boards like the fantastic Silverjaw lure
it would be fine and in the near future I want also to get my hands on I thing.Linux is supporting more miniPCIe WiFi cards and together with an mSATA and a miniPCIe slot for the entire
OS you would be able to set up your own WiFI AP.- Wireless AP
- SoftEtherVPN Server
- UBNT Wireless Controller
With FreeBSD OS you could also set up a small network helper appliance with;
- WireShark
- TCPDUMP
- VPN Server
- SNMP Server
- iPerf & NetIO
- Syslog server
- CACTI & MRTG
With the Silverjaw lure and a mSATA & miniPCIe modem you could also build a mobile pfSense
box with one LAN port as a firewall with build in modem.
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Burning this board up doing installations all weekend. All the Ubuntu flavors work great and same with FreeBSD. I am giving up on bootloading Arch via EFISTUB. I am missing a step somewhere and Grub works. I have installed all to the SSD and also installs to the SilverJaw lure MSATA card. I also have my Sierra MC7700 working for GPS right now(no sim slot). Cannot figure out FreeBSD Xorg problem. Looks like a dual monitor problem even though the board only has a single video output. Screen not found….
Xorg works great with all others and Lubuntu loads in like 10 sec. flat from boot.
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I also tested using both the Silverjaw mSATA slot and the SATA port together and it worked well. I noticed that the bios needs to have the SD card set to SDR50 for any kind of performance there. I see the SATA settings in the bios has hotswap capability. I jumped up to 5V3A power with all the extras. The mSATA i am testing is an early Samsung 16GB and draws 1.25a. I have more on the way at 64GB@.6a and 24GB@.5a
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I also have my Sierra MC7700 working for GPS right now(no sim slot).
If you can get your hands on a miniPCIe modem in half high, this adapter with a SIM card slot on the bottom is perhaps the right thing for you. DeLock Item No. 65230 Converter Mini PCI Express half-size > full-size + SIM
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I actually ordered more of these:
http://www.bplus.com.tw/Adapter/MM3U.html
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Well after mashing together the "Begginers Guide" and EFISTUB guide i got an working Turbot-Arch UEFI install on SATA.
With Arch Linux in the UEFI boot menu.
As usual was missing one critical command: bootctl install
This made the EFI folder with the files I needed..
Several guides said –Don't install a bootloader with GPT/EFI-- Well this cost me 2 days. Luckily I went back to the beginners guide! Funny how the advanced instructions miss this critical bit.
Arch has good doc's but the hyperlinks are too much.XFCE4 Install went smooth and looks good