[September 2019] A revisit to add the lspci data to the main hardware page. To do this I installed Tiny Core 10.1 on to a Compact Flash card and booted from that. Other than the boot time being noticeably slower than more modern thin clients there were no other issues. It took ~80 seconds to get to the desktop. Also there were no error messages or 'oops's in getting there that I had seen all those years ago with Tiny Core 3.6.
Now back to the words from 2011......
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.
Puppy 5.2 takes an age to boot - so long in fact you think it must have crashed! However it does eventually get going....
From grub prompt to a working desktop DSL booted in 1 minute 44 seconds. This included starting a SSH daemon and Apache. Puppy took 6 minutes (without SSH and Apache)!
Tinycore 3.6 booted and ran. However in the output we have:
Linux version 2.6.33.3-tinycore (root@box) (gcc version 4.2.2) #2012 SMP Wed May 12 17:05:42 EEST 2010 CPU: vendor_id 'SiS SiS SiS ' unknown, using generic init. CPU: Your system may be unstable. ..... Detected 249.386 MHz processor. .... Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver sis5513 0000:00:00.1: SiS550 ATA 100 (1st gen) controller .... PCI: setting IRQ 11 as level-triggered ohci_hcd 0000:00:01.2: found PCI INT D -> IRQ 11 ohci_hcd 0000:00:01.2: OHCI Host Controller ohci_hcd 0000:00:01.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1 ohci_hcd 0000:00:01.2: irq 11, io mem 0xf2008000 hub 1-0:1.0: USB hub found hub 1-0:1.0: 2 ports detected ..... eth0: RealTek RTL8139 at 0xd0074000, 00:90:dc:03:57:d7, IRQ 11 yenta_cardbus 0000:00:0b.0: CardBus bridge found [0000:0000] yenta_cardbus 0000:00:0b.0: Enabling burst memory read transactions yenta_cardbus 0000:00:0b.0: Using CSCINT to route CSC interrupts to PCI yenta_cardbus 0000:00:0b.0: Routing CardBus interrupts to PCI yenta_cardbus 0000:00:0b.0: TI: mfunc 0x00001002, devctl 0x66 irq 11: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option) Pid: 87, comm: modprobe Not tainted 2.6.33.3-tinycore #2012 Call Trace: [<c014d1b8>] ? 0xc014d1b8 ..... [<c03bcc35>] ? 0xc03bcc35 handlers: [<c02f7fa7>] Disabling IRQ #11 ....there is an "oops" and trace printout where it checks out IRQ #11. But once up and running all seems ok.
NB See also the VXL Percio and Neoware CA5 that use the same chipset.
I heard from misiu:
I've got one of those. my config includes pci wifi card and cardbus ethernet card, i'm using it for a router and it's doing it quite happily on my hacked down linux OS. I've replaced ram with a 512M ram stick, it's little too long so it's bent a little but works.
I was able to enable the sound on this box in linux. i have hacked the audio driver to force init. All it took is to change:
if (status & SIS_AC97_STATUS_CODEC_READY) sis->codecs_present |= SIS_PRIMARY_CODEC_PRESENT;into:
// if (status & SIS_AC97_STATUS_CODEC_READY) sis->codecs_present |= SIS_PRIMARY_CODEC_PRESENT;on a side note, to get pcmcia working i needed to boot with:
pci=assign-bussesstill, it's not working 100% reliably (my ethernet card can't receive, though it works in my laptop, and i have to reload modules because of initial irq fail). sisfb also works nicely. it will be very nice router box with head/headless option and audio support :)