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DT Research DT166: Linux 

Linux

Back in 2012 I had an email from someone that included:

"One year ago I made gps logger based on DT166 and TinyCore v3.0. Last couple a days I'm trying to boot TinyCore v4.x on DT166 without success. It's look like the problem is somehow related to SYSLINUX. To boot in TinyCore v3.8.4 (and lower) I'm using bootable USB loaded with grub v0.97 and bzImage and tinycore.gz (extracted files from iso)."


[2010] Having a number of pre-installed operating systems on Compact Flash card I tried them out....

DSL 4.4.10 loads and runs without any problems.

Tinycore 4.2 loaded and ran. With recent (v4.x) versions of Tinycore I do see regular messages appearing in the system log with the USB keyboard/mouse devices disconnecting and then reconnecting. This seems to happen every minute or so, but doesn't make the system unusable. It would be nice to fix this when I have time....

Lubuntu 11.10 takes an age - so long in fact that I gave up with it. I have no idea what it is up to whilst it highlighting/dimming those four white dots but I guess it is heading nowhere.

I also have some prepared USB drives:

Tiny Core V4.1 This booted and ran with no problems.

Tiny Core V3.6 with the Syslinux loader hung after displaying the Syslinux data.


In Jan 2017 I revisited the DT166 to check a few things out. The USB stick I picked up happened to have Tiny Core 7.0 on it. It wouldn't boot and hung immediately the initial Syslinux line appeared on the screen. The DT166 BIOS and Syslinux obviously don't like each other.

I replaced the Syslinux loader by Grub 0.97. Tiny Core loaded and ran quite happily, however there was no sign of the internal IDE port. I attribute this to the fact that Tiny Core doesn't include support for the CS5535 companion chip.

As mentioned above, with the USB ports only being V1.1, booting is a lengthy process. Having typed 'boot' at the Grub prompt I watched various messages scrolling up the screen for about 45 seconds and then all went quiet. After 93 seconds there were a few messages as Tiny Core started on its initialisation where the various apps are loaded. Finally the GUI was up and running with everything loaded after two minutes and 13 seconds.

I also thought I'd give Puppy Linux a try. Once again it was necessary to install Grub as the boot loader. Also, in view of the CPU, it had to be a non-PAE version. I picked on slacko-5.7-NO-pae.iso. From booting to reaching the setup menu it took 7:00 minutes. I blamed this on the USB speeds. Once booted it didn't seem much better - it was very sluggish when I tried using the setup menu. Unusable I'd say. I then tried booting from a Compact Flash card connected to the IDE interface. I was surprised to find it wasn't much faster - 05:50 to the GUI with the setup menu appearing some 20(?) seconds later. A lot of the delay must be to do with Puppy's initialisation process. For example it took quite a while sitting there showing 'Recognising Media Devices - optical input'. With the setup menu in place, when I clicked on the timezone drop down menu it was getting on for 10 seconds before the drop down list appeared.

The DT166 with its slow CPU and limited memory is obviously not a desktop replacement but it still has its uses - see the links tab.

Grub

Here's an outline of how I installed Grub 0.97. This is based on something I wrote back in 2011 which you can find here. (Scroll down to stage 5 where you'll find the detail).

I plugged the USB drive (or Compact Flash card in a card reader) with a standard Tiny Core installation into the USB port of a thin client that was already running a version of Tiny Core. (You could use anything running Linux). This one had grub-0.97-splash.tcz installed on it. The pen drive appeared as /dev/sdb with the linux installation being in /dev/sdb1.

Alternatively you could boot the pen drive on any PC, use the App browser to install the grub tcz file, and run grub to overwrite the syslinux loader. If you do this you may not need to use the device map file mentioned below. (NB: I haven't tried this so can't vouch for the process).

The basic steps I took were:

  • Create a text file /tmp/devmap containing the line (hd0) /dev/sdb. (Adjust /dev/sdx to match your setup).
  • Mount /dev/sdb1. With Tiny Core this will appear as /mnt/sdb1
  • Copy over grub's files:
    mkdir /mnt/sdb1/boot/grub
    cp /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/* /mnt/sdb1/boot/grub
    
  • Run grub:
    grub --device-map /tmp/devmap
    
  • Install Grub:
    root (hd0,0)
    setup (hd0)
    
  • Exit Grub
  • Create the file /mnt/sdb1/boot/grub/menu.lst.
  • unmount /dev/sdb1

More detail is in the article mentioned earlier.

 


Any comments? email me. Added September 2010    Last update January 2017