Posted from Non-Hacked I-Opener Netpliance

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MaxTek's picture
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Posted from Non-Hacked I-Opener Netpliance

Just found it free, was out to the trash. Put in my own isp dialupsettings and it works.

Now to figure out how to hack it and put on Linux.

Maxtek

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Well done, and well scored!

Well done, and well scored!

MaxTek's picture
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Re: Well done, and well scored!

Well done, and well scored!

Thanks. Putting Linux on it will not be easy. It seems you have to buy a special ide cable to hook up a drive...hate spending money.

Just got into Linux this past fall, so it should be an interesting project.

Jon
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Or you can mod a regular cabl

Or you can mod a regular cable by changing up the position of the connectors. I just Google'd it up and they just use two connectors side-by-side and plug into the middle set of pins. Modifying a standard 40-pin ATA cable is fairly easy if you are careful when moving the connector and lining it up to pierce the insulation.

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You can hack it. Possibly. ww

You can hack it. Possibly. www.linux-hacker.net is a great resource for information, although it hasn't been touched in over five years.

If you have a V3 or V4, you're going to need to either flash the BIOS or replace the BIOS chip with a V1/V2 chip. You can tell if it's a V3/V4 if there's a warranty sticker covering one of the screw holes on the back, and the screws in the stand on the back of the I-Opener are anti-tamper torx screws with a little pin in the middle.

You can get a hard drive adapter from Wizztronics.com for about $45 shipped, if they still have them in stock (they still did when I got mine about a month ago). It's a bit pricey, but easier than trying to cobble together your own IDE cable.

The CPU is horrendously slow, although if you have a newer hardware revision, you might be lucky and have a Rise 266MHz processor that, I believe, supports MMX. You're better off sticking a better Socket 7 CPU in there (Pentium or AMD K6-2/K6-III) and modding the board (removing a couple resistors and adding a couple SMT DIP switches) to make the CPU run faster than 200MHz.

A couple things to note:

It WILL NOT boot off USB. Any OS installation will have to be done either from another computer or from the installed hard drive. There are a few tiny Linux distros floating around, and you can try getting on onto the internal 16MB flash chip.

If you're not handy with a soldering iron and comfortable working with tiny surface-mount components, the best you're going to be able to do is install Windows 98 on it. If you have a newer model with the Rise CPU, there's a two-position DIP switch on the board that will let you change the CPU voltage, and you can install a better CPU (although it will be limited to 200MHz unless you mod the motherboard).

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