we’re setting up a small computer that will act as vpn end-point. we decided to try something smaller this time – BLKDE3815TYKH0E. as it turned out it’s not as well polished as one would expect from intel.
my colleagues had to pull out debian wheezy usb pend-rive with the installer to be able to finish the installation process, but that’s not a big deal – might be an issue with d-i itself.
but… with the latest BIOS version [ 036 at the time of writing ] – the divce will not boot without VGA or HDMI device connected to it. apparently it’s a general problem with NUCs – they don’t work well headless. one solution we’ve found is to attach ‘HDMI to VGA converter’, another – that might work – is to add 3 resistors on the VGA port. we did not try either of those. but based on this post older BIOSes don’t suffer from that problem. my colleague started downgrading and he found out that the latest headless-working version is 024. it just makes me wonder what sort of other bugs did we unleash by the downgrade.
btw – installation of debian on eMMC went fine – so in theory we did not need a hard disk at all. for us 4GB of space on the built-in flash disk are more than enough.