User Feedback :: DSL on a internet appliance

The IA-1 is a device designed to dial up the Microsoft Network and be an internet terminal. It originally ran wince.

It is a neat device, manufactured by Compaq with far more abilities than MS ever used.

It has a 16Meg internal compact flash disk which is /dev/hda. I have Midori linux (a teensy linux for these type of devices--a bit long in the tooth now) on it.

It has a slot for a second CF disk which is /dev/hdc.

It has 32 Meg of Ram, 4 USB 1.1 ports, a Lucent winmodem, a 2Meg Cyberblade video card (shared memory so that reduces main down to 30Meg) and a AMD K6-III+ 400 Mhz CPU (it originally came with a AMD K6-2 266 but it was socketted so
I upgraded it) as well as a IR controlled keyboard with an integrated mouse device.

By using a 2.2 G microdrive in the CF slot, I got a hard drive on /dev/hdc. This gave me swap space.

I was able to install DSL by using a CF to IDE adapter (that I bought from the DSL store last year) in a desktop that I have
and making sure the microdrive wound up being /dev/hdc on
the desktop so that lilo would be correct.

I popped the microdrive back into the IA-1 and booted it and presto! I had DSL.

I then got the 2.4.31 kernel (as long as I was going to compile a kernel) and pruned it down to have only the drivers/modules I needed plus selected optimization for K6. Plus I turned on the msr feature for AMD chips so I can use k6mult to adjust my multiplier on my K6-III+. Otherwise, it will only be using 4x instead of the 6x the chip is capable of.

Wow! I cannot believe how fast it runs now. The addition of a
USB ethernet adapter was all I needed to get access to my
broadband.

Thanks DSL for making my IA-1 live again.

original here.