Celebrate

FINALLY! I have the SATA SSD with the correct connector on it. Unfortunately, things have moved on and I have a traditional hard drive installed now instead, but I intend to switch back to the solid state once I've progressed a bit further with the development. Big party tonight, so once again I expect little progress for the next few days.

Cool Yule

Merry Christmas. I'll be busy with family things over the next few days, so ELMO will have to take a back seat.

Delayed

I've had some news from Iguanaworks - they say there was a delay in despatch but the product should have been with me by now, so they're sending another one. Not ideal, but I'll keep my fingers crossed that it arrives early in the New Year.

Welcome arrival

The Benq monitor arrived early this afternoon - just after I got back from work. After a few quick tests to make sure the monitor was OK, I plugged it into the Fit-PC and everything sprang to life. It all looks like it's working perfectly now.

Wrong / Missing

I've just recieved the replacement SSD back from the supplier. The Muppets have sent an IDE drive instead of a SATA drive - I know this project is named after a Muppet, but this is ridiculous - it's got to go back - Again.
I've also just realised that the IR transciever from Iguanaworks hasn't arrived, so I've had to chase that. A bit worrying, especially since it's an international shipment.
I was originally hoping to have 2 weeks off work over Christmas to work on this project, but instead I have to work after all. Just as well, so it seems, because I don't have all the things I need in order to make progress. This has been a frustrating start to things.

Out with the old

After lots of trial and error and testing, I now suspect either the monitor or the DVI cable are faulty. It's possible the Fit-PC is faulty too, but the first port of call is to eliminate the monitor issue. The DVI connection on the monitor has now stopped working on the main PC, so I suspect something has blown up inside the monitor. In order to get things moving again, I've decided to buy the cheapest (reasonable quality) DVI monitor I can find, and to this end have just ordered the £120 Benq G2220HD.

Samaritans

Looks like I've got a couple of responses to my cry for help. It increasingly looks like a display issue - seems a little odd but at least I have a route to follow now.

Sinking feeling

The Fit-PC will now not boot at all with the monitor plugged in. If I unplug the monitor when I power the device up and then plug the monitor in afterwards, it boots fine, but I still get the black monitor issue. If I wait for longer before plugging the monitor in, the monitor just says "Signal out of range". I get a nasty feeling there might be a problem with the graphics adaptor on the Fit PC, or it might be the monitor, or possibly the cable, I guess.

Cry for help

I've had to admit defeat. I've posted a cry for help on the Fit-PC user forum to see if anyone
can solve my black screen on boot issue.

Only blackness

Despite a complete, fresh install on the new hard drive, Ubuntu still goes all black on me when it boots. I can't think of anything else to do, I've followed all the instructions but it just doesn't work. I will have to go back and scratch my head some more.

Hard drive

I've decided that trying to work from a USB stick is getting me nowhere. There's no sign of the Solid-state disc, so I've decided to buy a 2.5" hard drive and see if that gets me up and running. Once I've got things into a better state, I'll switch to the SSD.

No progress

Still can't get the platform-specific distro to boot. Don't really know what's wrong. I realise that I'm really out of my comfort zone with Linux and so don't know quite where to turn. I'll just have to try to eliminate possible causes one by one, I think, and see where that gets me.

The Phantom Menace

Something isn't quite right here. I can build and boot from an installation USB stick, but when I build a proper installation onto a second stick, it boots the first time - then I apply all the platform specific patches and reboot and all I get is a black screen. This is a nightmare - I can't believe this is all so flakey.

Karma

Bit of a breakthrough today as I realised I was using an older version of Ubuntu. I've just switched to 9.10 Karmic Koala and suddenly my WiFi has burst into life and I can access all the internet resources, which is very cool. Perhaps things are finally moving on this project.

Limited progress

I don't seem to have got very far running Puppy from the USB stick. I can't even get the WiFi to work, so it limits what I can do quick significantly. I've decided to switch to a more comprehensive Linux distro and, because it's the one supported by Fit-PC, I've now got a version of Ubuntu up and running, which seems to be a bit better, although I'm still having problems with WiFi.

Set back

Unforunately, the solid state disc I ordered has a right-angle socket on it which means it's not possible to plug it into the internal drive bay in the fit-pc. It will have to go back.

I have, however, managed to get Puppy Linux running by using one of the USB sticks. Neat.