Android 4.0 ICS on Wyse Terminal

Today I used an old Wyse C10le to boot Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich from a 4GB bootable USB stick. This terminal had a corrupted firmware and failed to boot the Wyse OS, turned out that the flash based boot device was faulty. I thought it had good enough specs to try ICS on this device, with an x86 compatible VIA VX855 1GHz processor. I had to change the 512MB RAM to a 2GB PC2-6400 chip instead.

The terminal booted fine first time round, a bit slow booting from USB but was nice to get a welcome screen asking me to set up what it thought was a tablet. Running Android on this Wyse was pretty useless, no network connectivity and very unstable. Scrolling through the menus with the mouse and keyboard was quite fast but running any application would make it painfully slow. Sound was very choppy and it failed to render any kind of video I tried to run. I can’t really think of any useful need for this device at the moment and I’ve got quite a few terminals kicking around. I’ve successfully ran a number of different linux distros including DSL, XBMC and Fedora on this Wyse, a few S10’s and a V10l. Don’t know what to do with them now……….

Hackaday Retro Challenge

The hackaday retro is a really cool lo-fi version of the site intended for using your old school or low power embedded devices. Its fully stripped of styling and scripts, allowing devices with limited memory to be able to access it. Not having anything really old at home, I scoured through the storage room at work. Apart from a few really large (and heavy) NT4 servers, the oldest and portable device I could find was a Compaq Armada 1500c. I found a suitable charger and it booted up!  It was running Windows 98, packing a Pentium 2 processor and 32MB of RAM. It had a 10mbps ethernet port but to make it more authentic, I picked up an old external serial 56K modem.

Finding the drivers for the external modem was a nightmare. After plugging in the serial port and turning it on,  device manager found it as a communications device. There was no know brand name on the thing so I opened it up to find a Conexant CX06827 chipset. Googling it revealed that it was a generic modem chip so drivers from most manufacturers should work. I found that Zoomtel did a similar modem and still offered the drivers for download. 

Success!

Update: I sent in my entry to hackaday and got a mention on their successes page. Mine was not very hard and not very retro apart from the modem. Why not submit your attempt too?