Onelan box - DIY upgrade?

[dgsmith]

Anyone attempted upgrading the hardware themselves (for those who have an old onelan box which wont support v6)?

We have an NTB115 and it seems to be running a VIA C7 1ghz cpu with 256mb, yet the newer boxes only run Intel Atoms and Pentium DCs, so could it just be a case of spending a few quid on an Atom setup and moving the hard drive across? Essentially it's what's on the harddrive (the software) which runs the whole thing, and given the only reason we can't get v6 is because it isn't powerful enough to run it, then upgrading the hardware shouldn't be a big deal?

Shoot me down if I am speaking out of turn or suggesting something which is frowned upon, however it just seems like just a simple way of sorting it, or is there a software-enforced limitation that means it wont upgrade from v5 regardless?

[webman]

You will probably encounter difficulties with the major hardware change from CPU, motherboard chipset, network card etc to completely different ones.

[RabbieBurns]

If i remember Onelan runs on Fedora. Im not sure how well fedora lets you run an existing OS install on new hardware.

[kmount]

You're right, it runs Fedora and we too can't upgrade (even though our box is powerful enough) without paying £50 for the pleasure. I don't begrudge the £50, it's just £50 more than I'd want to spend.

Mind you, the native openoffice powerpoint interpreter would be nice.

[RabbieBurns]

Mind you, the native openoffice powerpoint interpreter would be nice.

I might need to look into this. At the moment our office staff have to pdf and then PNG a pptx every morning to put on our box.

[kmount]

Sounds like a lot of drama, just save the powerpoint directly to jpegs and dump them in.

[RabbieBurns]

We used to do that with 2003, but since upgrading to 2007 the resulting jpgs look absolutely awful.

[kmount]

Oh =( ..

[dgsmith]

Gone a bit off topic :x I take it noone has even attempted it then? webman, I think your point is valid enough, and if there were to be an issue, maybe drivers or what not may be the only problem (although if fedora ships with any standard drivers, maybe it wouldn't be?).

I suppose the only sure way to know is to stick the hdd in another machine and see!

[kmount]

Sorry, yeah, wandered away

Assuming you can get hold of a stock image for v6 it should be OK to be honest as the hardware requirements aren't Fedora's fault. I haven't seen a direct upgrade set of instructions otherwise I think I'd have tried it by now!

Drivers wise, I didn't see anything special loaded into the FC Kernel (I can look tomorrow if you want?) except for support for the TV Card SAA7134 iirc. Linux's fairly tolerant of hardware changes but it'd be worth trying to keep the "upgraded" kit fairly similar, IE, graphics chipset (worth checking your /etc/X11/xorg.conf to see what driver it's loading).


EDIT: Given my one is simply a HP Desktop SFF there's nothing obviously "special" that I seen.

[webman]

If you do try to put it in another set of hardware, I would advise mirroring the drive first onto another disk and using that disk in the new hardware. If any files relating to the hardware change at all, and fail to "change back" appropriately if you need to revert to the original hardware, you might end up with a non-booting box.

For all we know, there could be a OneLAN self-destruct feature that is activated on bootup and different hardware is detected

[dgsmith]

That's a good point, and one we'll be sure to take on board if we attempt this. Although, if kmount has newer hardware and it wont work, that's sort of knocked me for six a bit!

[kmount]

No no, they said they'd upgrade it if I paid