A little industrial PC rescued from the e-waste… I saw this rebadged Technologic Systems TS-7670 in the e-waste bin at work.

https://www.embeddedts.com/products/TS-7670

These machines are built around a Freescale i.MX286 which is an ARMv5 CPU. Not amazing these days, in fact I think #Debian have abandoned the `armel` platform… I do have one in the rack running #Gentoo though, and did once attempt to coax #AlpineLinux onto one. (Had to bootstrap it from Gentoo, got it booting, then `apk` promptly uninstalled the entire OS.)

I badly need to update the OS on the one I have, so having a second to test a kernel port on will be helpful. Why was this one in the e-waste?

I plugged it in, and noticed it seemed to be dead as a doornail. Plugged into the console port, and it was spitting out a hexadecimal error code: 0x8020a012. Life, but not as we know it.

Powered off, pulled the microSD out, it didn't even enumerate.

Grabbed a spare 8GB one, flashed it with an OS… I note /dev/ttyAMA0 doesn't seem to receive my keystrokes, but I now have it booting Debian 12. So it's alive, just a dead SD card. So I have a guineapig for a new OS. I'll have to dust-off my U-Boot port and kernel tree that I made for these things.

#Linux #ARM