Bill Layer wrote: > > 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... I have/had several of these winterms. Could you keep me posted about this? I would love to be able to boot linux. sim