I-Appliance BBS The Official Source for Internet Appliance Upgrades and Mods BBS Main List | Sign In | Sign Up | Search | Help | Linux-Hacker.net Reply to Thread | Printer |

Home / Other I-Appliances / Compaq IA OK Brand new - step 1

OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) ddrumguy Profile well i just bought an ia-1 on ebay and it comes with the elusive adapter for the hard drive - guy says it is unhacked. I would like to install a hard drive and run linux midori on it and have it wireless. I have been reading on a few sites and downloading files left and right. many of the links i have found around the net are dead - especially rasmus stuff can someone get me on the right path ? I am trying to get a plan together in preparation for this thing showing up Thanks in Advance, Bob 03-26-2006 11:29:24

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) yuppienibgibbins Profile First off, Thanks for everybodys help. This is how I got mine to work. Stick your bootable CF in. I could NOT get ANY DOS boot to work so I used. http://www.ia1hacking.com/index.php under 2000/XP Plug it in, then immediately mash(alternating repeating strokes) "T" and "F10"(a.k.a. the compaq button) untill I got a keyboard error. I stopped mashing buttons -wait a second-then I got a language selection and then into the BIOS YOU may or may not need to do the clear BIOS jumper trick. I'm a bit fuzzy on that because it was 2am when I got this far. goto the disk boot order menu and swap it, in my case when I got this far there was only two choices so... save & exit, and you should be booting from the CF slot first. after I got the CF card to boot this way it was a cake walk. -as it explains in the above URL, after you run the command to write to the onboard memory, remember to enter the bios again using the same method (button mashing) and change the boot to A: first C: Second D: third i dont know where that third drive came from, but this is how its working... so... save and exit follow the rest of the instructions on that URL 03-28-2006 12:59:02

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) keith721 Profile Instead of Midori (a few years out of date) may I suggest you try DamnSmallLinux ( http://damnsmalllinux.org/ )- I'm working with it on my GCT now and it autodetected everything I threw at it. At only 50 megabytes, it easily fits on a 64 meg CF card. It also has the latest drivers for just about all the hardware you can possibly consider. I guarantee you it supports the 10 Mbit KAWETH (Kawasaki) and 100 Mbit PEGASUS (ADMtek) USB wired devices and it's working with my Atheros miniPCI wireless card in the GCT perfectly. 03-31-2006 12:39:56

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) ddrumguy Profile sounds great keith, but i am clueless after going to the dsl site what file do i download and how do i get it onto the card so it is bootable (i have a 512mb card) I downloaded a dsl-0.7.3.iso file i guess i'll try putting that on the card and see if that works (i doubt it??) anyway any directions you could give would be greatly appreciated.. 04-01-2006 00:29:01

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) ddrumguy Profile ok so i am past bios and can get the machine to see the compact flash card at boot but i really need to know now how to get the dsl image onto the card so it will boot from the card. If i can get dsl running and a wireless ethernet connection running i will be happy for now. future plans will be bigger processor and a hard drive. but for now one bite at a time. i spent about 7 hours tonight dinking with this thing trying to get (any) image i could find to boot (tried old info on using dskboot , had a terrible time trying to use ranish. what a cluster)(&(& anyway i went to the forums on dsl and had no luck finding how to get this done - so i hope keith if you are out there you can lead the way. Thanks 04-01-2006 03:22:27

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) yuppienibgibbins Profile i couldnt even get ranish to run, i used disk probe(found on the URL in my first post) to write the *.img files to the CF which was really easy. my first choice was DSL but like ddrumguy i couldnt figure out how to get a *.iso onto a CF, i tried using nero but it gave me a "this is not a CD-Rom drive!" or something error. i chose to download the DSL-2.2.iso, and I also got the DSL-2.2-embedded.zip and ran qemu under windows(thinking that using that i could make a formatted bootable linux disk/ and or write the *.iso to the CF, but i didnt/dont know how to make it see ANY of my actual system devices, let alone the USB card reader and then do anything with the CF. at the moment i'm only planning on using the IA-1 for a chatterbox so i dont have to alt-tab in my main system, and i also wanted to play with a linux/unix system. :) i think what its got in it is plenty for that(i'll probably put a 1GB CF in it for grins). i still dont know how to get midori to see the CF card btw... working on it though. 04-04-2006 19:17:37

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 1 times) keith721 Profile Okay, I've been away for a while, but if you burn a DSL .iso image file to a CD-ROM, you can use that to boot a laptop or desktop running DSL from the CD-ROM. On the DSL system, you can click (or is it right-click?) on the desktop and run the DSL system utilities. A few items down on the menu are options to load DSL to a USB stick, a hard disk drive, etc. I used a USB-to-CF adapter which DSL saw as device sda0:, a SCSI removable disk. The DSL scripts don't work so well with sda0:, mostly because of the GRUB boot loader. GRUB insists on knowing all of the disk devices from boot time, so the USB-to-CF device isn't seen properly by GRUB. I manually executed most of the commands in the DSL script, mostly to define and format partitions on the CF device, then copy the DSL / Knoppix image and other files to the CF. My GCT booted it successfully several times. If you can read the DSL install scripts (they're not too complex) I'd imagine you can do the same thing for the IA-1. Once you boot DSL, you can open an xterm window, sudo su to get root, and find / -name \*install\* -print to locate all the DSL install scripts. 06-23-2006 17:39:14

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) ddrumguy Profile Thanks Keith, i have been outta pocket for awhile myself, i'll give that a shot and see what i can come up with... oh yeah tryin to remember, what was everyone doing to connect these IA-1 's to the internet (wireless)? Thanks Again for all your help 09-05-2006 20:15:21

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) ddrumguy Profile ok got dsl working, however the machine locks up shortly after coming up - running out of horsepower = maxes cpu out. any suggestions? can i change the cpu? what works better cpu wise? 09-05-2006 21:43:55

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) keith721 Profile Locks up? Strange to say the least. I used to run Win98 and Rasmus' Linux image on my white IA-1 without it locking up. It's an AMD K6-2 processor. You'd have to buy a better AMD K6-III or K6-III+ processor and run a utility to enable the cache. I think DOS or Win98 were the only ways they did that. All I've got these days are two blue "Clipper" units I snagged off eBay last year, and they're in the closet right now because I could never get past the BIOS issues. It's a shame really, because they've got the ethernet adapter on the motherboard. :( 09-06-2006 07:54:15

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) ddrumguy Profile any thoughts on which cpu to get (how big can i go?) and have it recognized.. any tips on getting the ia-1 to recognize it... any tips on jumper settings? Thanks 09-09-2006 18:15:03

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) keith721 Profile I believe a 450 MHz or 500 MHz is about the fastest chip you will find. You'll probably have to find a program to twiddle the front-side-bus speed FSB and/or clock multiplier to achieve the full speed, though. 09-22-2006 10:50:55

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) Harliquin Profile Your lockup problem is probably a X-windows issue. Try lowering the default X-Windows resolution in DSL. The IA-1 does not have a lot of video memory, and I don't think DSL detected the chip to well. 10-09-2006 09:16:00

RE:OK Brand new - step 1 (modified 0 times) ddrumguy Profile yup fiddling with settings seems to help... any thoughts on what i need to do to get a netgear usb wireless card working? 01-26-2007 23:54:05

Reply to Thread | Printer | All times are PST Powered by UltraBoard v1.62

I-Appliance BBS General - NEWS, Breaking NEWS - linux-hacker.net BBS on CD Questions - User Groups in Your Town - E-Bay, Yahoo Auction LINKS ONLY (MODERATED) - Jokes & Humor - usdtv box I-Opener Areas - I-Opener General Posts - I-Opener Technical Stuff - I-Opener Technical Info Reference (MODERATED) WebSurfer Areas - WebSurfer General Posts - WebSurfer Technical Stuff - WebSurfer Technical Info Reference (MODERATED) Other I-Appliances - Virgin Webplayer - WebPal - MailStation - 3Com Audrey - ThinkNIC / Oracle NIC - Gateway/AOL Connected Touch Pad - Philips/AOL-TV - ACER NT-150 STB - MSN Companion - Compaq IA - Emachines IA - IBM NetVista IA - Intel dot.station - MSNTV2 Network Computers - Fujitsu-Siemens Scovery Linux Net Computers - GallantWeb Server Consoles - Dreamcast - xbox hacking Web Pads - Epods One General Post - Panasonic CF-01 - Fujitsu Stylistic 1200 - Cybiko Thin Clients - Thin Clients DigitalVideoRecorders - DTV Recorders, Replay, TiVo, Etc... - Tivo Hacks Linux - Midori Linux General Board - ITX MotherBoards Single Board Computers - Earth Computers mARMalade Elite Member Area MISC Areas - The Swap Meet WE TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY TRANSACTION HERE AND NO COMMERCIAL POST PERIOD !!! - Wireless Net - Cameras - Robotics - Routers/Gateways - Mattel JuiceBox