[coreboot] Thin Client Compaq Evo T20

[Philip Loewen]

Thanks for your replies. It's exciting to have my questions 
received so well.

I'm not quite allergic to opening the case of my unit, but I 
should be totally honest about my plan to be a 'consumer' 
rather than a 'producer' of coreboot knowledge. Investing 
time and money in hardware to program the flash ROM and to 
detect small steps toward success would take me off-line 
from other projects (like earning a living) that I can't 
afford to quit.

My little Evo has a socket for additional flash memory, but 
the socket is empty and that's OK with me:

I am using the T20 as a thin client for several hours each 
day, with gentoo linux kernel 2.6.24. I get X graphics at 
1280x1024 at 16bpp, the maximum supported by the GX1, by using 
a patched version of GRUB that lies to the kernel about what 
memory should be used where. This patch, kindly supplied by 
others, sacrifices the framebuffer console displays, though. 
(All of them!) I am hoping that coreboot might get me 
everything: best-possible video, hi-res framebuffer, and 
efficient [non-emulated] sound support. (Then I would drop X 
and go with directfb for VNC.) Success stories and 
documentation are on the wiki at
   http://open-evot20.sourceforge.net/wiki/

Thanks again, ... Philip