Winterm
Good evening,
Ahh this is interesting, I've been thinking how to cut my power usage for a while and had this idea for a little while.
I work with Winterms at work and dare I say it Wyse's Rapport so I understand how alot of the Winterm terminals tend to work.
I've come up with an idea to use a Wyse Winterm V90 as a general download machine/general browser machine at home. It has 256MB RAM, 512MB flash as standard and a low power footprint.
I've not yet received it yet from Ebay (I won one on an Ebay auction though!). I did try the same idea with an old Compaq T20 but it had do little flash and RAM than I gave up before even starting. My idea was to use USB external drives for the storage and the flash to use a custom Debian 4 net install with just the most basic Linux install (or possibly Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux). The V90 also seems to have a Award BIOS and allow booting off harddrive, so I could at worst install Ubuntu on a USB harddrive and do a special kernel for the V90 :)
Well I've yet to start it but it should be interesting, the only thing that worries me is that I have a feeling that Wyse put the BIOS/bootloader in the flash memory.
If anyone is interested read these:
Linux on Compaq EVO T20 HOWTO
http://www.kazak.ws/evo/
WYSE Winterm hacking - News - Linux for the 3000 series
http://winterm.gaast.net/