Operating Systems that run on the MinnowBoard

[Phillip Lineburg]

Hello.

I am considering buying a MinnowBoard.  I've used Linux on and off for about 15 years, and when the Raspbery Pi came a long, it was nice to have a little computer running Linux instead of creating virtual machines on a Windows PC to accomplish those tasks.  I've bought other SBC and have found myself spending more time in either Android or traditional Linux distributions.

I do have a need, to test things in Windows, so a single board computer that can run both x86 Linux and Windows is of interest to me.

So far, I haven't seen much information on getting Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows 2008 to run on the MinnowBoards.  I would guess that since the MinnowBoard has a 32 bit Atom processor, that it should be possible to run those operating systems on the MinnowBoard, unless I'm mistaken?

Is anyone running Windows on a MinnowBoard?

[Scott Garman]

Hi Phillip,

While the fact that the MinnowBoard uses a 32-bit x86 chip helps ensure
binary compatibility for most OSes, we have a problem in that the boot
firmware environment is not well supported with various OS installers,
including Windows XP and 7. While these OSes support 64-bit UEFI
environments, they left out support for 32-bit UEFI environments.

Once exception to this is Windows 8.1, which should work with v1.00 of
our firmware. We have instructions on how to install the 32-bit
Enterprise version of Win 8.1 here:

http://files.minnowboard.org/pdfs/Installing%20Windows%20on%20the%20MinnowBoard.pdf

One way we could resolve this problem is to have a Compatibility Support
Module (CSM) for UEFI that supports legacy boot mode. It may be
possible that this could be implemented with open source software
(SeaBIOS), and I have someone investigating that, but I don't have an
ETA for when that will be released, nor can I promise this is going to
work for all OSes. I'll try to keep folks posted on this as I hear more
information.

Scott

--
Scott Garman
Embedded Linux Engineer - Yocto Project
Intel Open Source Technology Center

[Peter Wieland]

I've had some success getting Windows 8 installed and running on the Minnowboard, but I cannot find working drivers for some critical pieces like the Ethernet controller. There are some Windows 7 embedded drivers but the ethernet driver fails to start with Windows 8 and 8.1.

Also the firmware isn't setup to support installing Windows to SD (the SD card slot lacks the necessary _RMV ACPI method to indicate to Windows that it's non-removable). So you would probably need to install to a SATA disk.

-p

[Phillip Lineburg]

Hi, Scott and Peter.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.  I'll have to educate myself on the MinnowBoard and considering buying a license for Windows 8.1.

[Daniel Taibi]

Scott,
     Please make some kind of announcement on the minnowboard.org site when BIOS emulation support and booting from microSD is possible.  It also concerns me that Peter says there aren't ethernet and other critical windows drivers available.  Any recommendation for working XP and later drivers would be helpful.  I am very interested in purchasing a minnowboard once these issues are resolved.  I intend to use the minnowboard as a thin client, and would prefer XP because it is still fairly lightweight and supports all of the hardware I care about.  I've setup a r'pi board using rdesktop, but I'm not a fan of all the hacking, tweaking and fiddling needed with linux to get applications and peripherals working just the way I want.  I like the simplicity of just loading windows and knowing that there are few limitations on peripherals.
Anyhow, it looks like a great low power product (just what I'm looking for) and I'm anxious to use it once these kinks are resolved.

Thanks,
Dan

[Scott Garman]

Hi Dan,

We'll definitely make announcements along these lines once the approach
is proven to work. MinnowBoard isn't an official Intel product (it's
really CircuitCo's product), and it was designed primarily as a Yocto
Project development platform. So there were no contracts with Microsoft
to develop hardware-specific drivers for the board.

If you're really looking for a thin client PC, I'd encourage you to take
a close look at the NUC (Next Unit of Computing) devices. There are many
options with Core or Atom processors at different price points.

Scott