[Asterisk-Dev] Embedded Asterisk

[Lars Boegild Thomsen]

Hi Jean-Denis,

In my experience they are 100 % reliable by themselves.  They do however
suffer slightly from an extremely outdated BIOS.  When I first got my sample
box booting the default BIOS settings resulted in IRQ conflicts and that
could cause your box to freeze as you mention.  After an update (readily
provided by GCT Allwell) things improved - _slightly_.  It still require
some fiddling with IRQ's to make it work.  First test if you still got the
box - try to disable the sound device!!!  The sound device "emulates" a
standard SB16 - but it emulates it poorly.  If you upgrade to Linux 2.4.21
or later you'll find a native Kahlua driver in the kernel and that improves
things a lot.

Another thing is the OS of course.  What OS did you put on it?  It takes a
LOT of work to get a Linux up and running in such a "tight" environment and
since the processor is NOT even Pentium compatible, lots of pre-compiled
stuff won't work without a recompile.

The only negative thing I can say about those boxes is the fact that they
use a Video chip with no open source framebuffer or even X11 driver
available.  Allwell do provide binaries but that is unacceptable for me.
Because of that I cannot currently recommend the box for any application
that actually uses the video output from the box (which is the target
customers - they do market this as a set-top box).  But for other
applications - router, firewall, wireless access point, pbx or whatever the
boxes are fine.

Approaching off-topics here unless you feel like giving Asterisk a shot on
those machines :)

Regards,

	Lars...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-dev-admin at lists.digium.com
> [mailto:asterisk-dev-admin at lists.digium.com]On Behalf Of Jean-Denis
> Girard
> Sent: 28 October 2003 05:14
> To: asterisk-dev at lists.digium.com
> Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Dev] Embedded Asterisk
>
>
> Lars Boegild Thomsen wrote:
> > Oh by the way (forgot) the single biggest problem I have right
> now is that
> > the Allwell box'es does NOT have a usb-uhci device :(
> >
>
> Are these boxes reliable ? We managed to get a couple a those STB1030N
> (230 and 266MHz) here in Tahiti, and tried to use them as thin clients,
> but they were just freezing after some time... We just gave.
>
> --
> Jean-Denis Girard
>
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