[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI on a fanless mini-PC

[Gary Mills]

This must be one of the smallest and quietest computers to run OI.
It's a Partaker Fanless Mini PC.  It's quite small, but has an Intel
Celeron J4125 Quad Core CPU.  It also has built-in Intel graphics,
with an HDMI and display port video ports.  This machine also has two
ethernet ports, both of which I wanted since I intended it as a NAT
router.

When I first tried it, I got no output on a VGA monitor, even though I
used two different VGA adaptors.  When I switched to an HDMI monitor,
I got immediate output.  It seemed to boot freebsd, not the windows 10
that was advertized, and have no BIOS.  I was wrong there: it does have
a BIOS.  Pressing the DEL key at the right time does display the BIOS
setup screen.  You have to press DEL as soon as the keyboard becomes
active.  The first thing to change is the boot delay.  Setting it to
10, from 1, will give you lots of time to press DEL, and will display
a message telling you what key to press.

There's no boot menu in the BIOS setup, and no USB stick entry in the
boot priorities.  Nevertheless, it is possible to boot it from a USB
stick.  Magically, a USB stick will appear in the list of priorities
once you insert a USB stick.  All you have to do is to move it to the
top of the list.  This process must be re-done on each reboot. I did
this to boot memtest86, the OI-gui stick, and the OI-text USB stick.
There were no significant missing drivers.

Ultimately, I installed the OI-gui distribution, and upgraded it to
the latest OI.  That's what the system is running now.  I used the gui
version mainly because I only know how to use the Network GUI to
configure the network.  I won't need a console once the configuration
is complete.  I certainly will never need the web browser.


-- 
-Gary Mills-		-refurb-		-Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-