Well today my Sam and OS4.1 arrived from Amigakit safe and sound.
Thought I'd let you know my first impressions.
I chose to build my sam up in a ITX case, I chose this one from LINitx:-
http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11124, The reasons I chose it were it had space for a 3.5" hard disk and that save me buying one for the Sam as I already had a 250Gb one on hand and it came had room for a pci card and came with riser (more on this later). Also in the case I fitted a slot loading DVD Rom drive with suitable SATA adapter. I would heartily recommend LINitx as a supplier, I have used them a number of times and never had any issues with them.
Unpacking and fitting into the case:-
I had already installed the discs into the case as I’d had an ITX PC board in it until Sam arrived. So it was just a matter of installing the board in the case and cabling it up. The Sam currently doesn’t come with an IO back plate but I have been assured by Amigakit they will forward one to me when they arrive from Acube, which means I’ll have to strip the machine down again when it arrives, though at £450 I would expect this to be included at time of purchase.
The mounting holes lined up with my case perfectly, as they should being the ITX standard but nice to see.
The ATX power header is a right angled one which makes the attachment of the power cable when the board is mounted rather difficult.
The internal USB header is only 8 pin and not the 9 pin keyed type found on most pc’s so some care has to be taken attaching front panel connectors (note the 9th pin should hang off the connector to the rear of the Sam).
The PCI riser would not fit as it is keyed to the 5 volt type of card and the Sam only excepts 3 volt cards, not a fault of the Acube or the case manufacturers but damn annoying as the supplied riser is dog legged back to fit the case so standard riser will not fit, so no wifi for my Sam for now.
All the other cables were easy enough except for the lack of polarity information for the power and HD leds but this is on a par with most pc board manufacturers, as always I made a best guess and was wrong so quickly shut the Sam down and reversed them.
The PSU supplied with the case is rated at 80w and is running my Sam, hard disk and DVD rom with no problems.
Once the machine was assembled I powered it up and inserted the OS4.1 cd and the installation process started booting. The installation is process is exactly the same as OS4.1 on the Amiga one.
Upon the successful completion of the install the hard disc tried to boot and failed dumping me to a uboot prompt after about an hour of swearing and messing about I realised that this was caused by a PEBCAK error (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard). I had forgotten to check the bootable box on DH0. DOH!!!
Once I rectified this the hard disk booted straight away and prompted me to set up screen mode, sound card and internet connection. All of which went well except I can’t get a display larger than 1280 x 1024 at the moment (my monitor will do 1920 x 1200), but I’ll play with that later.
More on how OS4.1 performs later, I want to go and play with it now.
Gaz
