[KLUG Members] Notes from purchase of little diskless box from a1scs computer sale.

[Dirk H Bartley]

Greetings

Thought some on the list might be interested in the progress in an
attempt to get a mini diskless host up and running.  It's a visara 1783
thin client workstation.  

http://www.visara.com/Products/ThinClients.htm

It contains a cyrix 233 processor with a heat sink only, so no fan
noise.  It has one pci OR isa slot available for an adder card.  On the
motherboard are all the standards like paralell/serial/usb/ ethernet and
vga.  It also has one IDE connector for hard drives and cdroms, but no
place to mount or connections to power them.  It looked intriguing so I
paid $25 for one of them from a vendor at the show.  He said at the time
they had a bunch of them.

Also on the motherboard is a 16 megabyte m-systmes diskonchip.
http://www.m-sys.com/content/products/product.asp?PID=2&FILE=doc2k&FAM=doc
(note the size range from 16MB-1GB)

I had it at home for a few weeks when I gave it a whirl.  There was an
existing operating system that looked very x-windows-ish.  It would
recieve an ip address from dhcp.  The installed os had a few clients on
it for mainframes (not telnet) and citrix.  All other settings were
password protected so I could not change any settings other than through
dhcp.  It had a QNX4.x format on it when I got that far.

It became more interesting to me after I discovered this device was
supported by the linux 2.4 kernel MTD code. (memory technology
devices).  Use and manipulation of it requires a hard drive with both
dos and linux on it.  Loading of a grub firmware fire and formatting of
the device requires dos utilities from m-systems web site.

A patch must be applied to the kernel from the memory technology cvs and
grub must be compiled with an applied patch that comes with the grub
sources.  Redhat kernel source would not compile with the mtd patch.  A
pristine downloaded kernel was required.  Use of a different processor
to compile is encouraged because it takes forever on that 233!

I spent alot of time (30-50 hours) figuring out the specifics and I have
succeded in booting a lilo bootable ltsp file on the diskonchip and a
linux kernel from the diskonchip grub to a kernel on the hard drive.  I
got a crc (decompression) error when trying to boot a linux kernel on
the doc itself.

The best directions I found were here.
http://lakeshoremicro.com/diskonchip-grub-howto.html

This little machine works great as a ltsp client with a different video
card.  The on board card did not work will with XFree86. If my last
issue of the crc error could be resolved, a second nic could be
installed and a small profile firewall distribution (like floppyfw or
another) may work just fine.  I'll bring it to tonights meeting.  At $25
(or less if more were purchased) it has possibilities.

Dirk