In my previous post, I discussed how to assemble an ARTiGO device. Now that the device is assembled and working, I need to get some software onto it.
The ARTiGO is essentially a small form factor PC. Therefore, as any PC owner knows, the machine has a BIOS that provides, amongst other features, the ability to select where to look for the software that is to run on the machine.
When my ARTiGO booted up, I was presented with the BIOS' boot screen:
The device would then attempt to boot from the attached HDD. The problem is that the HDD is currently empty, and I'd like to use some kind of bootloader that will signal Visual Studio and ask it to download a Windows Embedded CE image to run.
There was no on-screen indicator of what to press during boot-up to enter BIOS setup mode, so I started by hitting [ESC] and [F12]. It turns out that [ESC] takes you to the boot menu where you can select which device type to boot from:
While this is fine for the occasional boot, I wanted to setup my default boot device options and so needed to configure the BIOS itself. However, because there were no on-screen hints, I had to read the user's manual (online or from the accompanying CD) to see that in order to get into the (Award) BIOS setup, I had to hit [DEL] during bootup.
This gave me the usual BIOS configuration experience, including the ability to turn off the above boot screen and show me the BIOS boot info, and select from which devices, and in which order the machine would try to boot.
I knew I'd be needing to play around with the bootloader for a little while, so configured a bootable USB key (more on this in my next post) as my primary boot device, followed by PXE and then my HDD.
Booting from PXE will also let me try out scenarios where the device might be able to bootstrap from the network, saving me from having to continually shuttle boot files from my dev machine to my ARTiGO via a USB key.