When I first started testing this hardware I had an issue. I tried several distributions booting from USB:
| Tiny Core 7.0 | Boots. I tried various options including "Command Line Only"
Puts up the messages:
Loading /boot/vmlinux...... Loading /boot/core.gz.........ready. _ and then nothing further happens. |
| tahrpup 6.0 | Spits out a load of informational messages as it boots and initialises things.
Finally says "Starting X" and that's it. End on a blank screen. |
| archlinux-2015.05.01 | From the boot menu "Hardware Information (HDT)" runs OK. Booting Arch Linux is similar to Puppy: A series of informational messages that end with a blank screen, tho' in this case the monitor shows there is NO video output. |
| Slitaz 4.0 | As above, just ended up with a blank screen |
But I found that when I created a 'rescue disk' as described on Netvoyager's site I ended up with a 'Slitaz GNU Linux Live (2.0)' distribution that ran perfectly.
Subsequently I discovered (well, guessed) that there must be a strange interaction between the VIA Eden CPU and Linux's CPU frequency Control. If I changed the CPU multiplier in the BIOS so that the CPU ran at 900MHz all was fine. (See the Firmware tab). If you have a problem in getting your favourite distribution to run I suggest you try this first.
As I expected this issue vanished with later releases of Tiny Core. Version 8.1.1. (using the 4.8.17 kernel) ran quite happily with a 1GHz CPU clock.