Cory 7/9/26 Cory 7/9/26

ProtoThings Linux - Status

Booting of ProtoThings Linux on physical Pentium 2 333MHz — ProtoThings Linux Alpha 1.3 booting on a Pentium 2 333MHz and 256MB of RAM. (Gif is sped up by 8x)

I am still working on the tooling for fully automated builds along with defining the pipeline to get packages published to the repository. In the meantime I’ve also been working to get the size down on the live ISO from the Alpha 1.1 at 2.6GB to CDROM size and have successfully done so! The Alpha 1.3 ISO at 599MB can be found on the main mirror at https://mirror.protothings.tech/protothings-linux/ISOs/. We don’t talk about Alpha 1.2 as it was chaos while I was doing tooling changes to support automation. I’ve also added the SHA256 for the ISOs in the repository, because best practices. Alpha 1.4 will likely be used as the base to build the first debs published to the public mirror which will allow installation via `debootstrap`. Once the system can `debootstrap` I will likely look at which flavor of installer to use.

Cory 7/4/26 Cory 7/4/26

Fighting the Chaintech CT-6ESA…

While doing verification on physical Penitum II 333MHz hardware using the Chaintech CT-6ESA motherboard for ProtoThings.Tech Linux the BIOS randomly decided that it no longer liked the firmware modded SSD, reduced to 128GB from 240GB. After much confusion I decided to start with a fresh copy of the BIOS downloaded from The Retro Web Chaintech CT-6ESA archive. I then used BIOS Patcher v4.21 to add support for large disks and flashed the modified BIOS and we are now back in business. I still have no idea as to why I needed to reflash but it might be an issue with the AT29C010A ROM.

Cory 7/2/26 Cory 7/2/26

ProtoThings Linux - i686 (Potato2)

I’ve been poking around in the background building some scripts and tooling to create a Linux distribution from scratch which leverages `apt` and `dpkg` from Debian. I’m leveraging a modified and expanded Linux From Scratch (https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/) build with fakeroot, dpkg, apt, and supporting libraries all built from source. I am then building a live ISO which I will be using as the clean base to bootstrap the minimal packages for a working install. Currently I am targeting i686 Pentium II+ with 256MB+ of RAM.

The package mirror is located at https://mirror.protothings.tech/protothings-linux/ if you wish to track progress. ISOs are located at https://mirror.protothings.tech/protothings-linux/ISOs/

All media uses the following for user:password `root:root` `user:user`

Screenshot_iso-tester_2026-07-03_13:21:02.png

Screenshot_iso-tester_2026-07-03_13:22:17.png

Cory 6/19/26 Cory 6/19/26

Mirror.ProtoThings.Tech

I am working on some tooling for some source based Linux projects on x86_64 and AArch64 and decided to setup a mirror for https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu at https://mirror.protothings.tech/gnu as I am pulling sources as part of the tooling testing. I also plan to use https://mirror.protothings.tech for all future project needs.

Cory 6/4/26 Cory 6/4/26

NanoPC T6 LTS Cooling

I have a NanoPC T6 LTS 8GB from Friendly Elec which is currently running the EDK2 RK3588 port and was running a bit warm, 65C on the hottest point of the case, so I made some quick standoffs which press fit into the cooling fin groves in the official case and the holes on a 60MM fan. The STL file can be downloaded from Thingiverse.

Cory 6/1/26 Cory 6/1/26

OLED System Monitor

I was wanting an external system monitor and put together a solution using a Pico2 and an inexpensive 2.42in OLED with an SSD1309 controller. Full details in the Git repository at https://github.com/Xenenic/OLED-System-Monitor.