monline

During the first boot of the Evo T20 (I mean a boot from a powered down state, ie. with the LED not lighting) the firmware does not care for any key presses during the boot process, it jumps right to the flash-checking and starts the OS from the flash disk. However during reboots (either through software or through pressing the power button on the client) the firmware listens for key presses and does something based on what key you're holding down.

The point of this howto is to help you avoid some of the gotchas I had to overcome. This is not a fully detailed explanation on how to compile kernels or an introduction to what an Evo T20 is. I merely intend to share my experiences with "insiders" who already know what the problem is about and just wanna some pointers on potential problems along the way on compiling a kernel for use with the Evos.

I've spent quite some time now debugging the issue and finally got it working.

I've already found out how to use VLC to play Quicktime videos. Now I've faced some issues with WMV files. VLC did not play the WMV properly (it showed some "noise" instead of the real content), neither did any other player (like Kaffeine, Xine, Mplayer). For Xine I had to set the video output from "auto" to "xshm". For Mplayer I had to choose the "X11" video setting (this can be set globally in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf).

On Windows I got used to watching Quicktime videos in the browser, either by using Apple's Quicktime or by installing Quicktime Alternative. On Debian/Ubuntu you've several options for Quicktime playback in the browser ... just as if you wanted to do it on a downloaded file. You can use an Mplayer plugin or a VLC plugin. The latter is called mozilla-plugin-vlc so to put it up you just have to execute the apt-get install mozilla-plugin-vlc command. This'll install the VLC player too if it was not yet on your system.

X has a "-reset"/"-noreset" option which controls whether the X server should reset itself after the last client exits (aka. user logs off) or not. This feature has been introduced long ago to come up for the various memory leaks that are present in X. The default behaviour is to do this self-reset and it is good so. However if you use the NSC driver on a Compaq Evo T20, then sometimes upon such a reset the video mode is not set properly. X starts up OK, but you get only a blank screen to see. I've found two solutions for the problem.

If you're using Ubuntu Feisty (eg. with LTSP-5) on a Compaq Evo T20, then you've probably already noticed that the NSC driver fails to load. The problem occurs only with the latest (2.8.2) version. Reverting back to v2.8.1 fixes it. Here's how to do that ...

I'm sure that almost everybody dealing with Compaq Evo T20 thin clients experienced the bug with the Natsemi driver. After the network adapter is initialized, it spits the following messages to the console every few seconds: