I see this has been brought up once before, but there have been some
interesting developments since that time, and I want to revisit it.

Wyse makes a series of terminals know as 'Winterms' which are (as you
might guess) compact x86 PCs that boot from a flash ROM and run a thin
client for NT Terminal Server or NT/Citrix. I got one yesterday (model
2310) at MPC electronics for $15.00, not including a power supply. I think
I can fake the supply ;)

The Winterm 2310 is based on the AMD Elan SC400-66AC which is a 66Mhz i486
based microcontroller. It has 4MB of flash EEPROM and 8MB of DRAM. Other
hardware includes a VIA PS/2 mouse and keyboard interface, a Crystal LAN
10baseT Ethernet controller, and a Cirrus Logic 5440 series VGA chipset,
with 512 or 1MB of VRAM. All of the hardware has support in Linux, at
least in 2.2 kernels.

There is a 100% GPL project (working) called 'alios' which is a bootloader
designed specifically to boot a Linux kernel on an Elan SC400 directly
from ROM, without a BIOS. The Winterm 2310 meets all of the minimum specs
for operation, and has double the minimum RAM called for. Here is a link
to that project: http://www.telos.de/linux/alios/default_e.htm It would
seem that all of the heavy lifting has been done already.

What I need right now, is someone with an EPROM programmer that is capable
of programming the Atmel AT29C020 Flash EEPROM chip from which the Winterm
boots. This is the little 1/2" square PLCC package, not the standard DIP
package that normally is used for PC BIOS chips. Alternatively, it seems
that the Elan SC400 is designed to boot from a PCMCIA flash ROM card.. to
make this more interesting, the Winterm has a single type-II PCMCIA slot
onboard.. I suspect that there is some way to configure the board such
that it will seek it's boot image from the PCMCIA card. SO if anyone has a
PCMCIA flash card that is 4MB or larger (anything over 8MB is a waste of
space) I would like to borrow or swap for it, so that I could try this
out.

Look at me, I'll all keyed up... 


                           -.bill.layer.-
                          
-.those who are talking don't know, and those who know aren't talking.-

           -.frogtown.-     -.minnesota.-      -.u.s.a.-