[MinnowBoard] Where to install Linux (or other OS) on a MinnowBoard Max

[Hawley, John]

With the base board there's a couple of things you can boot from with reasonable performance:

- SD Card (if you are going to do that I recommend a larger SD Card, BTRFS and adding the compress=[zlib|lzo] option to the boot flags)
- USB 3.0 (same general recommendation as an SD Card assuming it's flash based)
- SATA (either disk, or Disk On Module (DOM))

The first two don't require you to fish out power from another source, so that's useful.  The real downside to both an SD Card and a USB 3.0 flash based solution is there's limited number of writes you can do to an SD Card, and there's a *LOT* of cheap/slow options out there (so buyer beware, there's even a huge variance in speed in the Class 10 SD Cards ranging from about 10MB/s (that's all class 10 means is a guaranteed minimum of 10MB/s) to 90MB/s (which are the ones I've been picking up).  USB Flash drives vary even more wildly, so it's even harder to make a recommendation there.

The SATA options (sans an mSATA lure for example), do need power, and there's two places on the board you can get it:
	- Low Speed Header (as suggested by David Rolfe), though I wouldn't myself recommend that
	- J2 which was intended as a fan header, but if you add a header it's a reasonable place to pull power from.

The other option (if you are ok with an additional power supply) is to use an external USB sata adapter's power supply (if you snag the ones that don't have a case they often have a power adapter).  This is the way I do it.

- John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: elinux-minnowboard-bounces at lists.elinux.org [mailto:elinux-
> minnowboard-bounces at lists.elinux.org] On Behalf Of David Rolfe
> Sent: Friday, September 12, 2014 6:07 AM
> To: elinux-minnowboard at lists.elinux.org
> Subject: [MinnowBoard] Where to install Linux (or other OS) on a
> MinnowBoard Max
> 
> Hi.
> 
> Following Roel Jordans installation comments, I was wondering if it is indeed
> recommended to install an OS onto a (suitably large) micro SD card?
> 
> Presumably an external SATA SSD drive is a preferred option but then of
> course there is the problem of an external power supply etc. - Possibly from
> one of these extension leads which include a USB socket for charging mobile
> phones?
> 
> Although a 5v supply can always be obtained from pins 1 & 3 of the low
> speed expansion header. this would presumably then be lost if a lure was
> fitted?
> 
> Comments would be appreciated!
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David (Rolfe)
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 12:03:24 +0200
> From: Roel Jordans <r.jordans at tue.nl>
> To: <elinux-minnowboard at lists.elinux.org>
> Subject: Re: [MinnowBoard] About debian or linux on minnow board
> Message-ID: <5412C4EC.7030409 at tue.nl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"; format=flowed
> 
> I have debian 7.6 running on minnow max.  It was quite easy to install from
> USB disk using a micro-sd card as root.
> 
> I made UEFI bootable USB disk with the amd64 netinst image and installed
> everything using display over serial port.  I expect that using a normal screen
> would also work but I didn't have the micro hdmi cable around.
> After installing the base system and activating the sshd I switched to a
> network login to further install and customize.
> 
> This [1] description helped me quit a bit when I had to create the bootable
> USB drive.  The description there is using an Ubuntu iso but any UEFI
> bootable iso should work the same.  The basic actions are 1) to extract all files
> from the iso image onto the drive and 2) to set the bootable flag on the
> partition.
> 
> Cheers,
>   Roel
> 
> [1]
> http://askubuntu.com/questions/395879/how-to-create-uefi-only-
> bootable-usb-live-media/
> 
> On 11/09/14 18:59, ?? wrote:
> > Can debian or linux be installed on minnow or minnow max board?
> > Where can I find the instructions?
> > Thanks!
> >
> 
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