(last updated: 10-Oct-2011)
The current configuration is in its original 'as acquired' condition.
07-Oct-2011
While browsing the University of Utah's Surplus store, I came across a large number of these thin client boxes and decided that $10 was not too much to spend to take a closer look. The unit uses an external in-cord power wart (12V @ 3.3A) which cost an additional $3, for a total of $13.
07-Oct-2011
My usual method of dusting and cleaning with Windox did the trick of cleaning this system up very nicely. Nary a scratch on the unit, and it includes the small 'foot' that allows the system to stand vertically.
07-Oct-2011
After the very simple cleanup phase it was time to play! After a few photos of the internals and the Disk-on-Module flash disk, I connected the unit up a PS/2 keyboard, USB mouse, and VGA monitor and powered up.
First I entered the BIOS by pressing F10 (TAB shows POST, F12 to force netbooting). The 64MB 'harddisk' parameters are:
- Cylinders: 977 - Heads: 4 - Sectors: 32
The system boots just fine, and works perfectly. Windows CE is booted with the system, set up to work with a Citrix server elsewhere.
I'm going to try booting PuppyLinux from a USB stick and see how that goes.
08-Oct-2011
This unit is capable of booting from a USB device. My thought was to try booting PuppyLinux from a USB stick, and I started by enter the CMOS setup and selecting 'USB' as a first boot device. I then booted a standard PC with the PuppyLinux 5.2.8 CD that I had earlier burned from the downloaded ISO image. Fortunately, PuppyLinux has a very simple installation menu, and I selected 'MENU->Setup->Puppy Universal Installer' and selected the target USB flash drive. All went quickly and smoothly.
With the USB stick prepared, I inserted the USB flash drive and powered up. Lo! It boots right into PuppyLinux as smoothly as could be.
There is a priority sequence for which USB port is used for booting. I discovered by trial and error the arrangement. It seems that the #1 socket is used first; if no bootable device is found there, the system will try socket #2, and so on. The arrangement is:
... _________________
++ \
+- -+ \
| | |
+----+ |
|
+--4-+ +--3-+ |
+----+ +----+ |
|
+--2-+ +--1-+ |
+----+ +----+ |
... __________________/
Running PuppyLinux is just not quite usable on this system with just 128MB RAM. The system will hang if too many programs are running (i.e., more than one!). I did find some success by mounting another USB flash drive, creating a 128MB swap file, and activating the swap file. With this configuration, I successfully ran well, multiple apps, though the speed was very slow due to all of the swapping to the slow flash drive.
With this experience, I thought it would be valuable to try a Windows installation, and with the limited memory I chose to install Windows 98 SE.
I had some trouble preparing a 256MB USB flash drive to boot under MSDOS. I tried various combinations of FDISK and FORMAT but wasn't successful until I manually edited the partition table on the USB flash drive, marking the partition as bootable (1BE:80). Why the DOS FDISK and FORMAT would not do this is beyond me. Still on the host Win98se box, I entered DEBUG and used the following to read (g=100) and then write (g=120) the MBR after editing it:
-e100: B4 02 B0 01 B5 00 B1 01 B6 00 B2 82 BB 00 02 CD 13 CD 20 -e120: B4 03 B0 01 B5 00 B1 01 B6 00 B2 82 BB 00 02 CD 13 CD 20
VT8235 southbridge VIA CLE266 chipset VIA Rhine II ethernet VIA 82xx audio
Max Memory 2GB AGP 8x VIA UniChrome Pro video
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