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VXL tc3200: Linux 

Linux

The TC3200 was advertised as running SuSE....but then came without the CF card.

It happily boots DSL 4.4.10 from USB or Compact Flash.

It ran an old copy of Puppy 5.2 that I had on Compact Flash card.

Tiny Core 3.6 ran - sort of - from a USB pen drive. My first impressions were that it didn't run, but after I edited the syslinux.cfg to remove the "quiet" parameter I could see that it was booting but that the Syslinux loader was extremely slow:

  • After 35 seconds it had managed to load bzImage
  • After 2 minutes 50 seconds it had managed to load tinycore.gz

Once loaded everything was apparently ok and I ended up with a Tiny Core desktop after an elapsed time of about 3 minutes 10 seconds! Once loaded I found I couldn't read from a Compact Flash card in the IDE interface. There might be a driver issue to sort out with the latest releases although the dmesg output does identify the IDE device as a vt82c686b which matches the IC on the motherboard.

Tiny Core 4.02 ran from a USB drive - but slow to load thanks to the USB1.1 interface speeds. Once loaded I used the app browser to download tc-install and used this to install Tiny Core onto a 128MB DOM plugged into the 40-pin IDE connector. This went without a hitch and 4.02 apparently runs perfectly from the DOM. One thing to remember with the latest kernels the command line parameter for selecting a UK keyboard is now kmap=qwerty/uk.

 


Any comments? email me.    Last update October 2011