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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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19 years ago

Got a product board, but dont know how-newbie

Hi all,

A friend gave away one product board for my own use. It's a full board for terminal client (got LAN, sound jack, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, power). Although im new in this uclinux, but not new in linux for desktop. I plan to make my own home terminal server using this board. I've read this wiki:

http://nioswiki.jot.com/wikihome/operating...ems/uclinuxdist (http://nioswiki.jot.com/wikihome/operatingsystems/uclinuxdist)

But stuck as my board is not a dev board which need all those cable (even if I can get those cable, i cant see any pin slot on the board).

From what i've seen, this product board already can be use but the flash rom is pre-configured to connect to the Window based OS (I've tried before and work but only for windows terminal server and not linux).

Question:

1) Where do I start?

2) Is the product board flash can be reprogram?

3) If it's really can be reprogram, how can I transfer those compiled uclinux flash images into the board?

4) I'm going to use LTSP for the server, does reprogramming of the flash necessary or there is another way to boot the PXE bootloader by using this default pre-installed flash of this board?

One thing, I dont know what brand of this terminal client board, but the chip has the altera EP1C6Q2xxxxxx.

I've googling before but cant search for a starting point. Really need help, i'm loss, many thanks.

1 Reply

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    19 years ago

    Sound like an interesting board.

    But hacking a softcore FPGA is more difficult than it was on a hard chip. You will need at least a PTF, (about hardware resources, for memory and io port address etc) of the 1C6 to build uClinux.

    There should be some JTAG header or contact points to program the flash.

    The current Nios2 is MMUless, it may be difficult to run real X server and LTSP. But there is NanoX, and a VNC server ported to it. I think the Windows terminal use RDP.

    I don't know if anyone added PXE to Nios2, but you may try u-boot to remote boot the kernel.