Episode: 2417
Title: HPR2417: Transmeta Crusoe - Fujitsu-Siemens Futro S210 (ThinClient) - Trouble Shooting and Debian 9 Install
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2417/hpr2417.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 02:34:33

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This in HP are episode 2417 entitled Transmeter Crusoe, Fujitsu Siemens Fertro S210, Inclient,
Trouble Shooting and Domain Island soil.
It is hosted by A.W.U.B. and in about 13 minutes long and carry a clean flag.
The summer is, I did amazement cleanup and got my old Transmeter CPU up and running.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
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Good day and welcome to another Hacker Public Radio podcast.
My name is JVP.
You can reach me at JWP5 at hotmail.com.
What I wanted to do today was talk to you, I cleaned up the basement and there are various computers down there.
It was semi-emotionally and I had a throw away a lot of stuff.
But what I kept was I kept my pies.
So I've got four pies and an old droid and a pine 64 down there and I sort of set that up in a little cluster of things that will be various podcasts.
But what I found was I found an old thin client, a Fujitsu S210.
And this thing's claimed to fame was that it came with a Transmata CPU.
And so around 2000 a company called Transmata was leasing a fabric time from IBM chip fabric.
And they made the Transmata Corusso line of chips and this little thin client has a Transmata and it has a 512 of Mb of RAM.
And I had lots of problems with it before and the thing is the BIOS is so old that it doesn't take well to USB DVD boot.
And it won't do, although I did have puppy running on a Linux stick on it at one time that some reason it didn't like it anymore.
And the neat thing about this is it has a CF card that is on a secondary IDE bus.
And so you can boot from that bus, but you have to get media to that and install it.
And I, man, it was a hard, hard evening.
I tried with open Suza tumbleweed, it didn't work, I tried a boom too, it didn't work.
And so I was like, okay, what always works?
And I said, well, NetBSD always works.
And...
Damian always works.
And so I downloaded the net install from NetBSD and Damian.
And of course, I later found out that the real reason is that the USB ports didn't put out enough.
So I had to have a two-prong USB adapter connected to the DVD drive.
I happened to have a second one that did have a two-prong, rather than a single-prong.
And the second thing was it didn't like DVD media.
Even though it was in a DVD player that was attached to its thing.
So I had to get CD media and I found I found I happen to have two blank CDs.
I didn't even know I had blank CDs anymore.
And I put the Davian 9 on it, the I-386 version.
And I...
Apparently it didn't like the CD very much.
But it tilt the box a certain way.
And finally I got the thing to boot.
And the Davian went through...
I tried to go through the graphical install and it was just not enough information.
And so I went through it, had to stop and go through the text install.
And then I couldn't get the partitioner to work.
For whatever reason I didn't want to do it.
And so I was like, okay, so then I had to...
So then I was cleaning up the basement anyway.
And so I found an old version of Puppy 5.
And I booted... I put that old CD into the DVD player and it liked that CD.
And so then it booted that.
And then I got...
She parted up from that old Puppy.
And then I put an Etsy 2 on the 32 GB SD card.
And then I put two and a half gigabytes of swap.
Now the reason I did that was...
A guy named Joe Collins recently had a video log on YouTube about the difference between a swap partition and a swap file.
And Boone 2 was moving to a swap file.
And while he still thought that the swap partition was the way to go,
that he always used a magical 2.5 GB.
And so I thought I'd give that a try.
With the G-Parted, I made a 2.5 GB swap.
And we did the install and did a text install this time.
And sure enough, even on the install, it saw the swap partition.
So the reinstall of it went really well.
And it took a while that the TransMata CPU is only 700 MHz.
So it took a while to maybe over an hour to get the XFCE CD done.
And thank goodness and the text install it offered me also to get LXDE.
And so I got it to boot and it came back and I was really worried and really worried about it,
you know, doing all that work and it not booting.
And so I got it to reboot and booted into XFCE.
And it was using 384 Mbps of 512 and about 14 or 15 Mbps of swap just sitting there.
And I was like, oh, that's an awful lot.
And so then I was like, okay, well, what can I do?
And so I switched into XFCE and then it was only using 128.
And I was like, oh, that's better.
And I looked at the browser and the email client and they had Firefox and deviled for the email client.
And I was like, no, that's not going to work.
It's just too big.
And so I put links, Alpine, Nano, Nano with already there and SC on it.
And I said, okay, well, if I need to do some real work, those console based things will do.
And links was really surprisingly refreshing there.
And I got my Dory to work a little bit on it too.
The interesting was that when I switched to LXDE,
everything just got instantly better for some reason with that box.
So a little bit more about the TransMata thing.
And so it's a little bit of a living history.
So like I said, TransMata didn't own any fabric themselves.
So they ran it from IBM.
And IBM made some great chips back then.
HP did their...
Their...
A PA risk and even digital made some chips in their fabrics.
They had a fantastic chip fabric.
Okay.
And so the carousel family of X-86 compatible microprocessors was developed by TransMata.
And it was introduced around 2000.
The carousel was notable for its method of achieving X-86 capability.
So instead of the instruction set architecture being implemented in hardware or translated
by specialized hardware,
a carousel runs on a software application layer or a virtual machine
notice a code morphing software, CMS.
And CMS translates machine code instructions received from programs to native instructions
for the microprocessor.
And this way the carousel can emulate other and other instructions set architectures and ISAs.
This used to allow microprocessors to emulate the X-86 Intel instructions set.
And theory is possible for the CMS to be modified to implement other ISAs.
So if you wanted to do PA risk or alpha or power, it could...
TransMata demonstrated this by executing Java byte code,
by translating byte codes into instructions in its native instruction set.
In addition of an abstraction layer between the X-86 instruction stream
and the hardware layer means that the hardware architecture can change
without breaking compatibility.
So just by modifying the CMOS,
for example, TransMata Activon,
a second-generation TransMata design has a 256-bit wide VLIW core
versus 128-bit core of the Caruso.
Caruso performs in some software functionality,
traditionally implemented in hardware instructions.
By reordering resulting in simpler hardware with fewer transistors,
the relative simplicity of the hardware means that Caruso consumes less power
therefore generates less heat and other X-86 compatible microprocessors in the same frequency.
A 700 MHz Caruso ran X-86 programs at a speed of 500 MHz,
pinium 3 processor.
Although the processor was smaller and cheaper than the corresponding Intel processor,
okay, and that's the one that I have.
And while I say that it's low power,
that I touched the box, the C200 thin client,
and I think it's awfully warm, awfully warm.
And so they had two versions.
It's with the TM3200 for embedded applications,
or the TM5400 for low-powered personal computing,
both were based on the same architecture,
but different in-clock frequency and peripheral support.
And I guess that key was peripheral support.
And the BIOS, you know, it had a USB floppy and a USB CD,
but it didn't have any DVD.
Okay, it does have a PCI card in it.
I don't know where I could find PCI cards,
but it had a serial port, which is why I've got saved from the trash also,
because I still have a collection of sions that I want to try to talk to,
and the sion works off of serial port.
And I'm pretty sure Debian has some old-sion libraries.
So the Fujitsu Siemens in Germany seems to be the big thing with this.
And again, I put a 32 Gigabyte Transcend card,
and it had no issues, right?
It just went on and on and on.
And there's several little, several little car machines.
So the tutorials, the basic was a 210, and it was 210,
and he had a lot of them originally came with 128,
so I found an old 512 from a laptop and put it in, and it was fine.
And the reason that they had the SF card was because Fujitsu Siemens
could put their own spin of their thin client OS on it, or XP embedded.
And so you just pop that out and pop in your Linux,
and boom, because the machine has a secondary IDE,
and it just boots right off.
So that's why it didn't happen.
And I've seen them with card readers, SIM card readers, all of them and stuff.
I just have a basic one, a basic one there.
And everything seems to work with Puppy,
I had radio going on it a few years ago.
And this time that's going to run the Sion,
and I don't think I'm going to do very much audio with it.
I may see if I can record some basic podcasts with it to see
if it'll work or if it'll work or not,
but right now it has debut and nine on it.
It seems to be doing quite well.
And everything seems to work fine.
And it'll be a great project to practice with the serial interface on it.
And really that's about it.
So I hope you all enjoyed my thing.
The Old Transmata does work fine with David.
And once you get it past the BIOS and get the thing booted,
if there's any questions or comments,
please write me at JWP5 at homel.com.
Thank you all very much for your time.
And have a great day. Bye.
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