Past weekend, having come across some older-generation thin client made by Wyse, the Winterm S30 model, I fiddled with it for many, many, many hours – so as to get it going – and I thought I should share my results with you.

Now, Wyse Winterm S30 – of 2007 production – has some modest specifications – but enough to make it work as expected for remote terminals:

1. CPU:
   1. AMD Geode GX2 with 32KB L1 cache (0KB L2), running at 366MHz.
   2. Flags: fpu fpu_exception wp de pse tsc msr cx8 pge cmov mmx mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow .
   3. From the above, one may notice this x86 CPU is non-PAE and, thus, cannot handle more than 4GB of RAM.
2. RAM:
   1. 128 MB SODIMM DDR (DDR1) 333MHz (PC2700), CL 2.5.
3. Motherboard:
   1. My mainboard is of 02L revision, with replaceable RAM module.
   2. PCI specifications: 32 bit, 66MHz.
4. Video:
   1. AMD Geode CPUs have the GPU in the same cip as the CPU.
   2. Shared memory of 4 to 16 MB of RAM, BIOS configurable.
5. LAN:
   1. Controller: Realtek 8139
   2. Flags: pm bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation .
   3. Meaning of the above: 10 & 100 Mbit/s, full duplex.
6. Storage:
   1. IDE controller (Linux driver is pata_amd) with, I believe, 64 MB of storage and WinCE 5.0 residing on it.
   2. Maximum size of allowable USB sticks is 4GB.
7. Ports:
   1. 4x USB 2.0 (or 1.1 if you ask me).
   2. Serial (RS-232).
   3. Line Out, Microphone.
8. BIOS:
   1. Some greenish, useless thing, useless than even the old Phoenix BIOS back in the days, where one can: set BIOS password, set boot order (IDE, USB, PXE, none) and set time and date.

Now, I wouldn’t want to alter the contents of the IDE flash device (it’s not a hard drive per se), and I wanted it to run some Linux flavor straight from an USB device, simply because I didn’t get the chance to very much play with Windows CE 5.0 that this thin client ships with, and I would like, at some point, to study it.

So, I tried:

1. Ubuntu 12 and 10, including non-PAE. No go.
2. CentOS 5, no go, froze during text-mode install at language selection.
3. Bodhi 32bit, non-PAE. No go, didn’t work.

Anyway, as Wyse Winterm S30 disables the IDE controller on USB boot, you may need to re-compile some Linux kernel to include the CS5535 IDE controller driver. Please bear in mind that the procedure described there is for an older kernel version.

On a one-CPU 512MB RAM virtual machine running TinyCore 5.2 (latest version as of writing this), under my Ubuntu machine (AMD 64 X2 4000+, 4GB DDR2 800MHz), I managed to compile a custom TinyCore Linux kernel with the CS5535 and CS5536 IDE controllers enabled (one is disabled by default, and marked as experimental) in about 20 minutes, not without surprises.

So, knowing that Wyse Winterm S30 is not exactly state of the art technology, and knowing that 128 MB of RAM would not suffice for fully-fledged desktop Linux distributions, I went after minimalist distributions from TechRadar’s 8 of the best tiny Linux distros list, as follows:

1. Damn Small Linux 4.4.10 works fine, if you download the non-PAE ISO. My problem was that it’s software repositories seemed not to work, and I needed something not delivered in the base distribution.
2. Crunchbag 11 starts, but is almost useless. Remember to also select the non PAE version (I won’t repeat this anymore, and just assume you get the point of using only non-PAE ISOs).
3. Lubuntu uses a PAE kernel, so it’s a no go.
4. Puppy Linux might work, but it froze during boot. I have not excluded some hardware failure, so you may just give it a try.
5. Slitaz … I can’t remember. I don’t think it was working.
6. Tiny Core Linux. I stopped here, as I couldn’t believe I could get anything more from this Wyse Winterm S30 „beast”.

So, in spite of having read the articles written by Parky Towers on Wyse S30, I tried to get more, and failed. There really isn’t much more than this, at least not without cumbersome overhead.

Thus, I stick to Tiny Core Linux (the reason the list above contains only six entries) because:

1. It has a decent UI that is not resource-intensive. Personally, I used Tiny CorePlus, a 70+ MB distribution.
2. It has many, many packages available. I was most interested in Python 2.7 (yeah!), openssh, tightvnc and so on.
3. The plethora of packages are easily-available via a built-in application manager (so there’s no hassle installing anything).
4. It works fast to very fast, even on such modest hardware configuration as Wyse Winterm S30.
5. The system seems to be stable.

My current setup is: Wyse Winterm S30 boots from some USB stick and has persistence enabled (that is, I don’t lose data on legal shutdown/ reboot performed from the UI, some very neat feature of TinyCore), something simple and elegant that I love.

Of course, TinyCore has a learning curve, but all in all, it should work just fine: I tried browsing with Opera 9, Lynx and some other browser that I already forgot about and it all was just fine, I connected to the box with TFTP and SSH and VNC and it was also just fine, in spite of the modest hardware…

Furthermore, upon playing with Python, I even managed to install PIP so this is good beyond words (although, I forgot to persist the changes) and I love it.

So, if you have some interest in these thin clients, TinyCore has a package for Apache2, MySQL (Maria DB) and SQLite, Python and Perl (I didn’t find PHP) and many, many more development tools.

Anyway, I already ordered a 512 MB DDR 333MHz (PC2700) CL 2.5 memory module, due to arrive at the date of this publishing, that might bring even more fun.

In the end, if you have questions, comments or add-ons to what I already wrote, the order of the input boxes (left to right) is: name, email and URL the „Comenteaza” button means submit, if that wasn’t obvious enough.