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Wyse 3125SE: Linux 

General Points

I have not yet got the video to work on the WT3125SE - the screen remains blank once the Linux kernel loads. This is no great hardship as the WT3125SE does have a serial port. Anyway, with only 64MB of memory, there is little incentive to waste memory on a graphical interface.

For development a keyboard is required as you'll need this to invoke the NetXfer protocol at some point by hitting the 'p' key on power up. Having a screen attached is useful for feedback that NetXfer is running, but, at a pinch, you could manage without.

Progress

...I've revisited this (Jan 2012) and eventually sorted out various outstanding problems. I now have a build based on Tiny Core 4.2 that runs on the WT3125SE - see the Downloads tab above if you want to try it out.

This runs with a serial console (57600 baud, 8-bits, 1-stop, no parity). It also runs dropbear and so can be run 'headless' via ssh. In view of the limited RAM available (55MB/59MB) my initial target was for a build that was as small as possible. As a result I haven't yet had a look at getting the on-board video to work.

One interesting(?) feature of the build is that you can end up running with either 59MB or 55MB of RAM. You get the former the first time you run after applying power. If you shut down by pressing and holding the power button you end up with only 55MB on a subsequent reboot.

Future Work

I'd like to be able to use the IDE connector to provide internal storage with fast access. I'm guessing it must be usable otherwise why waste money fitting it in the first place? A quick trial with a CF card was not successful. Having spent sometime sorting out various issues to get a working kernel and serial console I'm taking a break from the WT3125SE. This will be probably be the first issue I pick up when/if I return to it.

Getting the local screen/keyboard to work remains as a possible area for future work. A 'grep' of the kernel source tree shows that various aspects of the SCx200 range are supported - i2c, gpio, watchdog, ide... - but not the video! Whether it is sufficiently close to the GX1 + CS5530A combination to be an easy(?) matter to duplicate some of the files in drivers/video/geode remains to be seen. Whilst this might be an interesting challenge, with only 64MB of memory available, it's not high in my priority list..

 


Any comments? email me.    Last update January 2012