Playing With The Viglen MPC-L

Like Tony, I too bought a couple of the Viglen MPC-L devices we reviewed in episode 11 of the Ubuntu Podcast made by members of the Ubuntu UK LoCo Team.

I wont repeat what Tony said in his two blog posts, but try to add to them. Read his first

Some things that I noticed though:-

The BIOS is quite basic indeed with pretty much no configurable features at all. I guess if I were in a positive mood I’d call it “simple”. The BIOS version info says “GROM_BIOS_IONA503_0.00.08_Viglen_03″ which gives away some detail. It’s date stamped 04/25/2006 18:28:04 which (along with the early 2007 vintage Ubuntu install) says to me these things have probably been kicking around on a shelf for a while.

The device itself is an FIC ION 503 (not the current 603 model pictured in that link) which appears to be similar to the Linutop 2 only the Viglen has a hard disk rather than just a USB key, and is a lot cheaper. Indeed you can still get them for £79 including VAT and delivery (in the UK) if you use the details we gave in the podcast.

After booting mine attached to an NEC 1700V monitor and logging in, I too had the “no swap” issue that Tony referred to, and fixed it in the same way. I suspect the reason for the odd partition setup (36G for /, 880M swap and 37G as /scratch) is down to the units originally shipping with a 40G disk. I guess they didn’t go through the effort of making a new build for the 80G disk but just fudge it on and add the extra space as a new partition (scratch).

I note they’re still shipping with Ubuntu 7.04 – which goes out of maintenance shortly, rather than a more up to date 7.10 or even 8.04.

The first thing I did after hooking it all up was apply the outstanding 7.04 updates – of which there are quite a few. I then (without rebooting) issued a “sudo do-release-upgrade” to kick off the upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10. This has been chugging away for a little while now, having downloaded all the necessary packages, it’s installing them.

Once this finishes I hope to just issue another “sudo do-release-upgrade” to take it all the way to 8.04 (gutsy). One reason I am doing this (with no reboots between) is to see if it can be done, partly to avoid any of the issues Tony had when he rebooted. The main reason though is because I’m using it to type this blog post and catch up with my email after returning from holiday, and
don’t really want to reboot!

Things I’d like to do:-

• Finish the upgrade process off all the way to 8.04 and reboot to a working system.
• Update the status of bug 236019 after testing the new driver for this machine.
• Upgrade to 8.10 (development version of Ubuntu) and see if there are any further bugs to uncover, and of course report those.
• Try a lighter weight window manager than XFCE – E17 perhaps, other suggestions welcome..?
• Upgrade the 512MB RAM and see if that makes any descernable difference (especially for firefox with lots of tabs)
• Try out IPCOP on it.
• Try out some emulators on it (Spectrum games for example)
• Configure it in “kiosk” mode to auto login and let the family play with it
• Something else?

Update: Bah, at the end of do-release-upgrade it says that to complete the upgrade you need to reboot (which I can easily do myself later), but then asks if you want to continue [Yn]. Press Y and it reboots! That doesn’t seem right to me.