As noted elsewhere my experience of the 3040 is that it will only boot in UEFI mode, not Legacy mode.
My initial attempts to create a stand-alone UEFI bootable version of Tiny Core failed and will be a subject for further work.
What I ended up doing was using Rufus to install Puppy Linux (fossapup64-9.5.iso) onto a USB pen drive. This booted and ran quite happily.
I then added the files for both the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions of Tiny Core 11.1 to the USB drive and found that I could boot either one of them quite happily as well, but I found the GUI would not run on the 32-bit version. I don't know why this is, but the same pen drive will boot into the 32-bit GUI on a Wyse Dx0D.
To add Tiny Core to the pen drive I did the following:
menuentry "Tiny Core 64-bit" {
linux /tcboot/vmlinuz64 loglevel=3 tce=UUID="40B7-7B8C"/tce64 waitusb=5 kmap=qwerty/uk vga=791 video=vesafb:ywrap,mtrr:3
initrd /tcboot/corepure64.gz
}
menuentry "Tiny Core 32-bit" {
linux /tcboot/vmlinuz loglevel=3 waitusb=5 vga=791 kmap=qwerty/uk tce=UUID="40B7-7B8C" video=vesafb:ywrap,mtrr:3
initrd /tcboot/core.gz
}
I put these at the top of the menu.
Note: Step 1 I did on one of my Linux boxes. The remaining steps I did on my Windows 10 system.
UEFI booting describes how I installed Tiny Core to the internal eMMC flash of the 5070. Like the 3040 this does not support Legacy mode booting.
Note: Others have discovered that the 3040 requires the file /boot/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI
to be present - see
Rob's Blog and other entries under the Links Tab.
In June 2026 I heard from PiterPunk:
I am running Slackware Linux on my 3040. While using it I found two problems that seem to be a common issue:
- The thin client doesn't reboot or halt in response to the commands shutdown -r or shutdown -h.
- Sometimes the screen goes into sleep mode and never wakes up.
The first is a known issue with dw_dmac DMA controller. To avoid the hang during shutdown, create a file in /etc/modprobe.d with the name ended in .conf (I use blacklist_dw_dmac.conf, but feel free to choose any other name) with the following content:
blacklist dw_dmac_core
install dw_dmac /bin/true
install dw_dmac_core /bin/true
That will blacklist and avoid the dw_dmac module to be loaded.
As to the sleeping screen: The screen turns off as part of energy saving procedures but doesn't turn on again. You can still login to the machine through SSH but there is no way to reactivate the display.
There are plenty kernel parameters that are said to solve it, but the one that works for me is by adding intel_idle.max_cstate=1 to the boot arguments. I put it inside the GRUB_CMD_LINUX on /etc/default/grub.
After making the change you need to run grub-update or grub-mkconfig.
Those are distro agnostic configurations.