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Wyse VX0 Firmware 

BIOS

The BIOS is a standard Phoenix AwardBIOS. Hitting the DEL key on power-on will get you into it.

If you find the BIOS is password protected hopefully the Wyse default password of Fireport should get you in.

The boot options are:

First Boot Device
LS120 ..... [ ] Hard Disk ..... [∎] CDROM ..... [ ] ZIP100 ..... [ ] USB-FDD ..... [ ] USB-ZIP ..... [ ] USB-CDROM ..... [ ] LAN ..... [ ] DISABLED ..... [ ]
 ↑↓:Move ENTER:Accept ESC:Abort 

If the option has been enabled in the BIOS you can also bring up this boot menu by pressing the P key as the system starts up.

Booting from a USB Pen Drive

This is fairly straight forward. Set the boot option to USB-ZIP. All this appears to do is tell the BIOS to look for a mass storage device which has a conventional partition table at the start.

The one remaining quirk is that the pen drive (or rather the boot partition) has to be 1GB or less in size.

[Update: July 2019 revisit] Whether what you've got will boot appears to be in the lap of the gods. I thought I would create a set of test USB Pen Drives to provide a standard way of checking things out with old BIOSs and was surprised by the result. I used the standard Linux fdisk utility to partition/format the drives and LiLi version 2.9.4 to install Tiny Core 10.1 onto the drives. In contradiction with what I wrote back in 2011 8GB and 4GB SanDisk Cruzer drives booted quite happily, but they just hung if I partitioned them so that there was an initial 1GB boot partition. I also tried two cheap anonymous 1GB drives. One booted and one didn't.

The USB booting behaviour was identical on V10Ls fitted with BIOS v1.5 and v1.8.

Keyboard support

I have encountered an oddity with the 'LE' version. Initially I plugged in a USB keyboard. The DEL key got me into the BIOS, I could edit stuff with no problems, but when I booted Tiny Core Linux I was unable to do anything with the opening Syslinux boot menu. It was as though no keyboard was connected. This was also true if I connected the USB keyboard to the PS/2 port via an adapter. The Syslinux boot code would only work with a genuine PS/2 keyboard. Weird!

The V90L I checked - no USB keyboard problem - was running the VT6048 BIOS revision 1.15.

The V90LE - USB Syslinux keyboard problem - was running the VT6048 BIOS revision 1.19.

Update:In March 2016 I had an email from Eric Kudzin. He wrote:

"The fix is to select LAN as the first Boot Device in the Advanced BIOS Features. (You can always hit Esc to abort PXE netboot to speed past it). Doing this somehow makes the USB keyboard work at the Syslinux prompt.

This has been tested on BIOS revisions 1.16 and 1.19, both of which have the bug (on both L and LE versions).

Alternatively, If you want to use the bug as a (limited) security feature, you can leave LAN out of the list in the BIOS and manually press P at boot. This brings up the popup boot menu letting you select the LAN option at this point."

Firmware

V90

The V90 runs XPe.

V30

I've recently got hold of some V30s that run Windows CE Pro 5.0. If you're interested in running the standard firmware and your V30 is configured in some weird way then you can easily perform a factory reset. All you need to do is hold the G key down whilst the unit starts up. I must admit I'm uncertain about exactly when it needs to be pressed to work. I just held it down all the time and only released it briefly on a couple of occasions when it looked as though the start up process was hung.

Once up and running you are in the Winterm Connection Manager and pressing F2 will get you into the control panel. At this point you can configure the unit however you want.

 


Any comments? email me. Added 2011    Last update July 2019