Comments on: More on the MPC-L

By: Lee

Lee — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:30:34 +0000

Is anyone else seeing major drift of their MPCs real time clock?
Mine’s losing anything up to 10 seconds a day…
I’ve had to put a cron job in to keep it in line.

By: Richard Appleby

Richard Appleby — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:04:56 +0000

I upgraded from Ubuntu Server 8.04 (Hardy) to 9.04 (Jaunty) today. The process wasn’t too bad, with only one hiccough. The intermediate upgrade to Intrepid worked, but the Intrepid 386 kernel seems to lack a working driver for the IDE chipset in the Viglen, which resulted in a kernel panic very early in the boot process. By booting into the upgraded (Intrepid) system using the original Hardy kernel, you can then do an upgrade to 9.04 (Jaunty), where the kernel appears to work just fine. Hope that helps someone else.

By: Alistair

Alistair — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:51:38 +0000

This unit apparently does support PXE booting;
press shift+F10 at the boot splash screen to choose boot option.
I don’t know how to setup the source data for PXE, but the MPC was looking for it.
Viglen have changed the name to “MPC-Contender” & they have some small downloads available at
http://download.viglen.co.uk/files/
Viglen have also fixed the HDD image-it now has two partitions: hda1 79G EXT3 & hda2 1G swap (approx.)
The MPC is a bit slow, but the basement was eerily silent while browsing the web.

By: Richard Appleby

Richard Appleby — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:07:00 +0000

I’ve “upgraded” mine to run Ubuntu 8.04 Server (Hardy); if Viglen are prepared to keep the price where it was for the special offer then this has the potential to become a most worthy successor to the NSLU2 for hobbyists like us.

Incidentally, installing from CD was not quite “by the book”, so I’ve documented how to get it working on my website here: http://appleby.is-a-geek.net/

By: Andy S-C

Andy S-C — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:27:03 +0000

I’ve posted the notes I’ve been making whilst taming the MPC…

http://stanford-clark.com/viglen.html

I hope folks find them useful!

By: Tony

Tony — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:02:44 +0000

Some helpful tips and tricks there. Doesn’t seem to solve the “hang on reboot” issue though sadly.

By: Andy S-C

Andy S-C — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:34:58 +0000

just changed the acpi thing as described above, and did a sudo update-grub…
much better: when you press the on/off button, it brings up the shutdown menu like when you do ctrl-alt-del on a normal machine. Cool!

By: Andy S-C

Andy S-C — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:53:39 +0000

w00t! Viglen listened to my comments… they’ve fixed the swap partition problem on their build, added the kopt stuff to menu.lst (see comment 2 above), and said:

“It could also be worth mentioning to the customer that we use the pci=noacpi argument instead of acpi=off (this allows the systems to shutdown gracefully, rather than the immediate shutdown which occurs when you pass the acpi=off flag and press the power off button).”

So the kopt thing should say:
# kopt=root=UUID=8d18d78d-5eb0-469f-b9ca-77e03b43db2c ro pnpbios=off pci=noacpi

(haven’t tried this yet, but something better than the instant dead stop when you accidentally hit the power button while plugging in a USB cable will be much appreciated!)

By: Andy S-C

Andy S-C — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:01:23 +0000

BTW, on Viglen’s product page for the MPC-L,

http://www.viglen.co.uk/viglen/Products_Services/Product_Range/Product_file.aspx?eCode=XUBUMPCL&Type_Info=Description&Type=Desktops&GUID=

it mentions some optimisations they’ve done to Ubuntu to optimise it for the MPC…
”
A daemon monitors applications that users run, it is through the analysis of this data, the daemon predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.
”

I asked Viglen what these magical daemons are, and they replied:

prelink – (ELF prelinking utility to speed up dynamic linking)
preload – (adaptive readahead daemon)

So now we know

By: Andy S-C

Andy S-C — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:40:36 +0000

To make sure you get the no acpi settings automatically set each time there’s a kernel update, add
“pnpbios=off acpi=off” to the
# kopt=root=…. stanza in /boot/grub/menu.lst
so it looks something like:
# kopt=root=UUID=8d18d78d-5eb0-469f-b9ca-77e03b43db2c ro pnpbios=off acpi=off
(note the “# ” at the start has to stay, counter-intuitively to we perl hackers!)

Then sudo update-grub

This automatically adds those things to each new kernel image that gets added to the boot list, so you won’t have to worry about kernel panics when you update.