forum.excito.com

From now on, Bubba is shipping with 128 MBytes of RAM. This to satisfy some customer requests.

All future orders, including current open orders, will be shipped with 128 MByte RAM. Of course at the same price as before.

Will it be possible to upgrade my old Bubba?

Hi,

Yes, Im wondering the same thing? if its possible to uppgrade for a small fee or something.

Cheers,
/Limpo

I'd upgrade not only for a small, but also for a moderate fee And the ARM processor too, to a 533 MHz one for example. It would make the Samba and FTP transfers much faster.

But I fear it will be not possible - anything of above...

Nevertheless the product is great, even with 64 MB RAM and the current, slower CPU

It would be good to be able to buy the 128 MB motherboard seperately (forget case and harddisk etc)

Well, I now at least one guy (that would be me) that would manage with only 64 MB of ram, and without disk. Maybe you would like to sell one to me, and buy the new one?

We have thought it through, and yes, we are able to upgrade your boards. It will however be quite complicated, and we aren't able to do it very cheap. This since buying spare memory parts is expensive, and that the soldering job is quite complicated. These are the terms if you are interested:

- You have to send your Bubba to us for the upgrade.

- Your on-board FLASH (NVRAM) will be re-flashed with a new bootloader supporting 128 MBytes, and with a more modern rescue FS. Thus, if you have made any tweaks there they will be lost. As far as I know though, noone has dug that deep into Bubba (yet).

- You may keep your hard drive if you wish, that's not needed for the upgrade. If you send it in, we will not make any changes at all on your disk, only boot it once for testing.

- We will have to keep your Bubba for up to one week, freight time will add to this.

- The price will be 50 EUR, plus the return freight (15 EUR for Sweden, 30 EUR for EU and 40 EUR for the rest of the world).


If you're interested please email us (info@excito.com) and we'll give you shipment and payment details.

Again, apologies for the high price, but there is unfortunately not much we can do about that.

Hi,

This is good news. However it's not easy for me to part from my Bubba, because it's my main server at home, there are severall friends that get their mail from there, and also because of this (yes it's glue! I don't want to remove the stand, it would ruin the paint...).

So what I propose is that instead of doing the upgrade the way you've explained, we could buy only the motherboard. I suppose this offer could be time limited and only for those who already have a Bubba... Is this be possible? Would it be very expensive?

Helder

Helder,

Yes, we've thought about that too, but can't make any significant discounts from the standard "NO DISK" option, we could sell a bare board for 200 EUR (including VAT) to existing customers. This since spare bare boards become quite expensive to us.

Perhaps Nöbbes idea is the best, to sell your 64MB Bubba used, and buy a new one?

Also, if you don't want to mess up your quite nice Bubba-holder, you can always unscrew the front plate and just send in the interior (board + disk). However, the downtime is still an issue of course.

Sorry that we can't give you better offers..

Hi,

That's quite alright. Maybe it's for the best, this way I'm learning a thing or two about optimization!

Helder

Your on-board FLASH (NVRAM) will be re-flashed with a new bootloader supporting 128 MBytes, and with a more modern rescue FS.

I would like to know, how to re-flash current (64Mb) to this new bootloader.

As far as I know though, noone has dug that deep into Bubba (yet).

I was searching for more information on arm bootloaders ( like u-boot ), but i am just scared to death to try it on bubba.. Short how-to about re-flashing broken (possibly) nvram would be desirable.

Hi,

What speed increasements would one see with the extra 64 RAM on bubba?


What would happen to the warranty on the bubba after one send it in, will it be extended after you have soldered on a RAM chip on it?.

/Limpo

osa:
This is quite complicated an can't be covered in a short answer. It requires deeper understanding of the Atmel ARM9 CPU since there isn't any universal quick way to do it. There are two options, one is through USB device, but requires some PC host software that handles USB DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade) data transfer, and Atmel doesn't provide one. The other is through serial port (X-modem protocol), and this is the one I think is easier. Get back to us if you still are interested and we'll try to put together a howto.

limpo:
Regarding speed requirements I think Tor answers this best, he'll get back with a post later on.
Regarding warranty, yes, we'll extend it to one full year from the new shipment.

Hi,

Regarding the bootloarders, the new bootloader is not compatible with the 64MB boards. The bootloader sets up the memory controller prior to the Linux boot and also tells Linux how much memory is available.
Thus, installing the 128MB bootloader on a 64MB board will cause the memory to be currupted since the linux kernel will try to access memory outside of what is available.

/PA