MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??

[colinjones]

It is based on the Intel Atom 1.6/745/ICT7 chipsets, with 8111C NIC. New Egg are selling these for US$140, all you need to add is some RAM (beware is it DDR2 SO RAM not standard), but I am having to import one to Australia via a friend, as most US based retailers (inc NE) haven't noticed the rest of the world exists and wont ship. I have already had him bring one out to me, but it was DOA. He is taking it back for exchange tomorrow, but I would really like to know if this is going to work before we go through all the hassle!

[darrenmason]

Hi Colin,

Can't help you out but am interested in how you go. I have been tempted to get an eeeBox as they have them near work here for $388 and talking to the sales assist. yesterday they come with a VESA mounting bracket.

Is there no Australian distributor for the MSI machine?

Regards
Darren

[colinjones]

Sadly, no - it is a very new model, and there is no mention of it being available in AU yet. MSI here are clearly incompetent as well - I have tried to contact them by phone and email. They don't list any phone numbers for Australia and every email address I sent to bounced saying the mailbox was full! (Sales, marketing, tech support, all!) I finally got one through to their HR department asking them to pass it on, that was 3 weeks ago, no response...

[justdeb]

Hi guys,

The main australian distributor for MSI is Ingrham Micro. They only sell to resellers though. You might also want to try universal enterprises. They did carry alot of msi stuff. I have not dealt with them for about a year so i don't know whether they still do or not.

Justin

[Crawtech]

Hi All

I am picking one up today for testing i will let you know how i go
 

[colinjones]

Thanks Justin - have emailed them...

ihas - great, please let me know as soon as you can, so I know whether to cancel the exchange and just get a refund or not!

[justdeb]

Hi ihas,

Did you source this locally and if so whom did u get it from. If it does work, please let us know as it is a nice looking board.

Regards

Justin

[Crawtech]

Hi all

Still testing but it is up and running i had to disable the  the screen saver as it locks up  as it does with all intel 945 chipsets

Justin
I got this one from RTV Computers www.rtvcomputers.com.au


let you know how it goes

[colinjones]

Totallymaxed - I finally got this PC, it now boots and finds the core and starts going through the motions. But very quickly (before it has started doing anything real) the boot sequence stops about 35 secs in and doesn't proceed any further.

Clearly the NIC started OK and the link light was green. But immediately after it says IP-Config: eth0 hardware address aa.bb.cc.dd.ee.ff mtu 1500 DHCP RARP it then says r8169: eth0 : link down

And the link light has gone red. It does this every time at the same spot so I'm assuming this is the point at which it loads the NIC driver for LMCE and there is some issue with the driver.

Does this sound like the problem you had with the Asus EEE PC? I note that my NIC chipset seems to be 8169/8111C rather than the 8168 in your wiki article. And on the Realtek web site it seems that the 8169 is only associated with the 8110....

Have you any suggestions please?!?!?

[totallymaxed]

Totallymaxed - I finally got this PC, it now boots and finds the core and starts going through the motions. But very quickly (before it has started doing anything real) the boot sequence stops about 35 secs in and doesn't proceed any further.

Clearly the NIC started OK and the link light was green. But immediately after it says IP-Config: eth0 hardware address aa.bb.cc.dd.ee.ff mtu 1500 DHCP RARP it then says r8169: eth0 : link down

And the link light has gone red. It does this every time at the same spot so I'm assuming this is the point at which it loads the NIC driver for LMCE and there is some issue with the driver.

Does this sound like the problem you had with the Asus EEE PC? I note that my NIC chipset seems to be 8169/8111C rather than the 8168 in your wiki article. And on the Realtek web site it seems that the 8169 is only associated with the 8110....

Have you any suggestions please?!?!?

Hi Colin,

Sounds like the same issue as on the Eee Box. See here http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168 for a quick page we put up on this.

Let me know if this fixes the boot problem for you.

All the best

Andrew

[colinjones]

Andrew - thanks, I thought it might be, but is there anything different I should do because it is 8169 rather than 8168?  I'm not clear on how it selects the driver, nor on whether the 8168 driver is ok to use with the 8169 chip....

[totallymaxed]

Andrew - thanks, I thought it might be, but is there anything different I should do because it is 8169 rather than 8168?  I'm not clear on how it selects the driver, nor on whether the 8168 driver is ok to use with the 8169 chip....

Colin,

do you happen to know the PCI ID of your NIC?

My colleague Uplink reckons that if it is something colon 8168, it's an 8168 and it's handled by the 8168 driver. if not, it's handled by the 8169 driver and then we'll have to look into more details.

Andrew

[totallymaxed]

Hi Colin,

We looked over the MSI Wind pages, and it has a different NIC than the EeeBox. It's a 100 Mbps Realtek 8101 as far as we can tell.

Andrew

[colinjones]

Andrew

That's the confusing bit for me - when it boots it says its a 8111C (and that seems to be the LAN boot in the BIOS) but later on in the LMCE boot sequence it says its 8169. Its not clear to me if both chips are involved, or one is a mistake. If a mistake i can only assume that the BIOS has it right and its a 8111C and the Linux PXE boot is mis-identifying it. On the Realtek site it seems to associate 8169 with 8110 in the drivers page, so that just complicates matters by suggesting that 2 chips are involved but not the right two!

The problem, of course, is that I can't get in at that point to do a lspci as the kernel hasn't started and I don't really have anyway of doing so. Does your colleague have any clue as to whether it really is the 8111 or actually the 8169 or both? Either way, is it still sounding like I need to compile a driver for it (v lost at the moment!) Its a shame because the unit is dirt cheap - US$140, add $20 of RAM and you have, surely, the cheapest MD around? (that's like 80 GBP or less!)

[colinjones]

Andrew - did uplink have a chance to look at my last question? I'm still a bit stumped on which is the actual chip, and so what to compile for it...

EDIT:

OK, I plunged in anyway and tried following the wiki instructions you indicated. (although I'm not sure I'm even building the right driver!) It created the r8169.ko file successfully and I moved that into the running kernel's drivers/net directory (although I realise it isn't the core I'm having problems with its an MD).

Then modified the initramfs-tools-interactor/module file to include "r8169" on the line after the only existing extry "sky2" and ran the Diskless_BuildDefaultImage.sh script.

I'm assuming that this just creates the boot code that gets tftp'd to the MD on start up, and so should now include a driver for r8169....

But now when it boots, it doesn't seem to say eth0 down any more (and there is some other change in the text of the boot sequence that goes by too fast for me to read!) - instead, immediately after saying that it has registered protocol 17 (that's TCP isn't it?) it says:

ipconfig: no devices to configure
/init: .: 1: Can't open /tmp/net-eth0.conf
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempting to kill init!

Not sure, but I seem to have gone backwards....