First day with Soekris net4801

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Contents 1 Where's the video card?? 2 Time to go shopping 2.1 Null Modem Cable 2.2 Gender Changer 3 Assemble your ingredients 3.1 Null Modem with Two Female Ends 4 Reference System 5 Make it come to life

Where's the video card??

Thats right this thing has absolutely no video card. It actually has absolutely no a lot of things. Thats kinda whats so beautiful about it. To make this little wonder come to life your going to need some special utilities to read from its serial port. Some stuff you'll probably need to go dig out of your spair parts bin is a null modem cable, a gender changer, a system with a serial port (don't laugh this is getting harder and harder to find).

Time to go shopping

So if you don't have these things time to go shopping.

Null Modem Cable

Gender Changer

Assemble your ingredients

Now you'll need to put them all together and get some sanity.

Null Modem with Two Female Ends

Reference System

This will probably be either a windows xp or the machine your going to later use to build bootable cf images for your new hardware. This system might then also run openbsd or linux. This should be all that you require to get a working prompt.

Connect it all up and lets get ready.

Make it come to life

Oh so you actually want to see it. Ok fine. Your going to have some choices here but I'll suggest either Windows XP and Hyperterminal, On a *nix system cutecom (Graphical) or minicom (command line based) should get you going.

In linux the serial ports are /dev/ttyS0

You need to use the following settings:

Baud Rate of 19200

Data bits: 8

Stop Bits: 1

Parity: None

comBIOS ver. 1.31  20070408  Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris Engineering.

net4801                                         
CPU Geode SC1100 267 Mhz
256 Mbyte Memory 

Pri Sla  TRANSCEND                       LBA Xlt 987-128-63  3981 Mbyte 

Slot   Vend Dev  ClassRev Cmd  Stat CL LT HT  Base1    Base2   Int 
-------------------------------------------------------------------
0:00:0 1078 0001 06000000 0107 0280 00 00 00 00000000 00000000 
0:06:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000E101 A0000000 10
0:07:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000E201 A0001000 10
0:08:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000E301 A0002000 10
0:10:0 104C AC23 06040002 0107 0210 08 3F 01 00000000 00000000 
0:18:2 100B 0502 01018001 0005 0280 00 00 00 00000000 00000000 
0:19:0 0E11 A0F8 0C031008 0117 0280 08 38 00 A0003000 00000000 11
1:00:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000D001 A4000000 05
1:01:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000D101 A4001000 11
1:02:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000D201 A4002000 05
1:03:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000D301 A4003000 11 

  Seconds to automatic boot.   Press Ctrl-P for entering Monitor. 5 4 3 2 1