Was a newbie, now a polliwog

Thomas Fritz tomfritz at direcpc.com
Thu Jul 22 15:01:01 CEST 2004


I became interested in linuxbios a while back, and while I've subscribed 
to this list I've never done anything with it.

I've learned quite a bit more since then, and I'm even working on 
reading the Linux From Scatch book.

I've come back around to it again, for two reasons...I have a working 
laptop (IBM TP 390X), and an extra mainboard for the laptop.  I have to 
do a password recovery on mainboard, but I was thinking if I'm going to 
go through the trouble, I would like to try something with it. 
Especially with the TSSOP flash bios chip within easy reach :)

The other reason...I've been looking at embedded applications lately, 
and I don't really feel like going the DIY hardware route...since I have 
access to a surplus source of IBM thin clients (403GCX PPC, PC87303 
SuperIO, S3 Trio64V+ video, single PCMCIA slot, two EDO SIMM slots, 
parport, serial, mouse/keybd, DP83907 ATLANTIC II ethernet, and a 
whopping 512KB AM29F040 flash bios), which have everything I could want, 
except USB, which a PCMCIA card could fix.

What I want to do with one of the thin clients is put on linuxbios, and 
since I would be using the PCMCIA for USB, boot a compact system off of 
a USB memory stick.

I was wondering how far along things have come, and if anyone has done 
something like the USB booting, or even what other devices linuxbios can 
boot a system off of?



Also, after reading about all that's been done with the X-box project, 
and the mod chips they sell, I was wondering if anyone has had any 
thoughts on something like the Xenium X-box mod chip?



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