BIOS
The Neoware CA19 has a standard Phoenix AwardBIOS. The boot options are:
- LS120
- HDD-0
- SCSI
- CDROM
- HDD-1
- HDD-2
- HDD-3
- ZIP100
- USB-FDD
- USB-ZIP
- USB-CDROM
- USB-HDD
- LAN
- Disabled
This makes life easy for us and most Linux distributions will run straight from the box.
Neolinux
My CA19 is running Neolinux.
Appliance/Administrator Password
If you don't know the appliance password you can reset it to a known value.
- When you switch the power on, as soon as the initial BIOS screen appears press and hold
the shift key on the keyboard. This will interrupt the
boot process and leave you with a LILO boot prompt. In my case this offers three selectable
options of Software, vga or nfs. These are obviously three different kernels.
At the time of writing I have no idea what the differences are. I would guess the vga
option might be a good one if you have display problems.
- Select vga and then type in single after it (so you have a command line:
boot: vga single) and press return.
This will boot the system in single user mode without launching the X-server interface.
- You should see a few messages:
Starting up.... open: No such file or directory.
- At this point press ALT/F2 to switch consoles. You should now see a list of startup messages
ending in a command prompt: bash#
- Use the passwd command to change the root (unix) password.
- Type /sbin/reboot to reboot the system.
Display Reset
If you screw up the display settings - or inherit a system that won't work with your
monitor - then follow the steps above to get to the bash# prompt then type:
/usr/sbin/factory_reset
This essentially deletes everything in the directory /writable. If you don't want to
lose everything you could try editing the file(s) there. For example in my /writable/sys/system.ini
file there is an entry:
[Settings/Desktop]
serverTimeout="30"
accessControl="false"
xDisplayNum="0"
scrnResolution="1280x1024-60"
....
Setting the screen resolution to a standard value like1024x768-60 or even 640x480-60 should get
you out of trouble.