The next step for my thin client

As I wrote in the final Thin Puppy Torture Test entry, I wanted to try some other distributions with the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client, so I finally shut it down.

After that, I opened up the box, unplugged the CF-to-IDE adapter and plugged in a 14.4 GB IDE hard drive by IBM and a 32X TDK CD-RW drive. I had trouble before even booting many Debian-derived Linux distributions, and I'm not exactly well-versed in the jumper settings for a hard drive and CD drive chained to a single IDE interface (there's only one IDE plug on this VIA-equipped Mini-ITX motherboard).

After leaving both drives as masters, nothing was happening, so I made the HD the master and the CD the slave, and then both were recognized by the BIOS.

And since this is a thin client, there's nowhere to physically mount any drives, so the thin client box is on its side, with the power cable (I had to use a splitter to power both drives from the single power plug) and IDE ribbon cable poking out from the box and the drives stacked on top of it. Man, I didn't know that a hard drive throws off so much heat. It's a far cry from when the thin client was running Puppy 2.14 from a Compact Flash card.

So I had a bunch of discs ready to try. I had previously booted Zen Walk 4.2, so I didn't want to try that one right away. The Fedora Core live CD wouldn't boot -- it kept rebooting the machine in a loop without actually doing anything. I tried to run the alternate install CD of Xubuntu 6.10, and the install went pretty far before I got repeated warnings like this:

Debootstrap Warning
Warning: Failure while installing base packages. This will be re-attempted up to 5 times.

I hit enter and kept going a bunch of times, but the install just wouldn't happen. Previously, the Xubuntu live CD wouldn't run, so I didn't even try it.

I tried openSUSE's net-install CD, and that wouldn't boot either.

Now this box is pretty untypical and tempermental -- when I first got it, the only thing that would run was Puppy Linux. DSL wouldn't boot then, but I tried it again and it not only booted but installed on the hard drive. Near the end of the install, the installer script told me I'd have to reboot, and I figured the system would do it automatically. It didn't, so I rebooted with ctrl-alt-del. The machine restarted and asked me to set root and user passwords (I elected multi-user during the install). I set the password and was off and running with the new DSL 3.3 on my hard drive!

The fact that of all the Linux distributions I've tried, I've only gotten Puppy, DSL and Zen Walk to boot is a testament to the people who put them together.

I should probably try to install Xubuntu again ... or Zen Walk, possibly dual-booting with DSL (I selected Grub as the boot loader, not that I know how to tweak it yet).

But so far, DSL 3.3 is running great on the thin client. Configuration of static IP networking was easy -- it's pretty much the same as in Knoppix, with a terminal window opening and a standard script running. I haven't checked the sound yet (gotta plug in the headphones), but I'll do that soon.

And I'm writing this entry on Firefox 1.0.6, the main browser with DSL 3.3, which also offers the light Dillo that runs so great in Puppy (but which really can't do Movable Type as well as a CSS-equipped browser).

As I wrap up this entry, I have no doubt that just about all of these distros mentioned would install on a "normal" system, and I acknowledge and understand that a thin client with a rare motherboard, non-Intel (or AMD) CPU and single IDE header might be far from normal, but the fact that some distros will boot on this somewhat exotic platform begs the question -- why won't they all?