The Soekris net5501 is a small form-factor computer based on a 586 class processor. Its low power requirements, fanless operation and wide operating temperature of zero to 60 C make it a great system to run Npemwin.
The model used in this deployment is a net5501-70. It has a 500 Mhz AMD Geode LX CPU, 512 Mbyte DDR-SDRAM and four Ethernet ports. The system uses comBIOS for full headless operation over a serial port. Although the net5501 is fully capable of booting embedded OS distributions from its compact flash interface, this deployment also includes the optional SATA drive mounting kit and a 64GB SATA SSD. The SSD permits using a regular OS distribution without quickly experiencing the write limits of compact flash media.
Since the net5501 is based on a 32-bit processor, FreeBSD 9.0 i386 and the FreeBSD 9.0 i386 Npemwin package were used for this installation.
Because the Soekris computer is DTE, one must use use a null modem serial cable to connect to it from another computer.
The default baud rate on the Soekris is 19,200 while FreeBSD is 9600. For convenience and to simplify operation, change the Soekris to 9600 using the comBIOS console: CTRL-P on boot and then the following from the Command Line Interface
set ConSpeed 9600 rebootThe net5501 supports booting from its single SATA interface, a Compact Flash Card or using PXE. It cannot boot from its USB interface. This makes OS installation a little challenging. Without a taking the time to deploy a PXE server, one can take a shortcut by temporarily mounting the SSD in regular PC to complete the OS installation there. Use the generic kernel.
Before removing the SSD and mounting it in the Soekris, make the following changes:
comconsole_speed="9600" console="comconsole"If the network card in your installation PC is something other than VIA Rhine, Rhine II, modify /etc/rc.conf to specify ifconfig_vr0.
With the SSD installed in the Soekris, download the FreeBSD 9.0 Npemwin i386 package from noaaport.net and complete the installation as normal.
A sample of the top command shows load averages: 0.67, 0.71, 0.63. This seems typical. When the programs that run under tclsh8.6 fire up periodically, as one might expect, they take advantage of all of the processing power of the 500Mhz Geode CPU. For example, CPU: 68.9% user, 0.0% nice, 31.1% system, 0.0% interrupt, 0.0% idle
You many also want to try compiling a kernel optimized for the Soekris box as outlined in this message in the Soekris mailing list.
Craig Fincher <cfincher14@yahoo.com> - Mon, 09 Apr 2012