IOpener Support

Submitted by lalee-admin2 on Sun, 11/19/2006 - 17:06

The Netpliance I-Opener was a marvelous little wonder back in 1999. It featured a decent 200-MHz Pentium-compatible processor, 32 Megabytes of RAM, and (most important of all) a built-in LCD screen. You could find these machines in retail electronics stores like CompUSA, and take it home for a mere $99. Equivalently equipped machines were going for five times that value, by the way, and was being marketed by Netpliance as a hardware loss-leader to entice a novice user into using the more lucrative Internet Services that come bundled with this device.

Along came Ken Segler, a hardware hacker who called himself codeman. Ken discovered and originated a popular hardware hack that allowed these machines to use (and boot from) a standard 2.5" Notebook drive. With that hack, a decent notebook drive, and some extra RAM, the I-Opener was able to run normal Operating Systems, like Linux and Windows 95.

Once that discovery was published, a huge following of hardware hackers followed, and thus the I-Opener Hacking Craze had begun.

It's been nearly a decade since that craze, and all but the most dedicated of I-Opener hackers have since moved onto other projects. These files and configuration notes are all that I could manage to archive about this little machine.

For More Authoritative Information

The official site for IOpener hacking information is Linux-Hacker.net. Their Technical Archives are a superb resource for performing all of the well-known hardware and firmware hacks.

X.Org and Recent Linux Distros

[2006-Nov-19]The IOpener is still capable of running current Linux distributions. At this writing, I have recently configured an IOpener for someone, with Fedora Core 6. You need to do some hand-tweaking of /etc/X11/xorg.conf to get it to display correctly, though -- X.org with the Trident driver will default to 24 bits per pixel ("Millions of Colors"), and it defaults to using Acceleration.

You need to set the Depth to 16, as the IOpener defaults to a mere 2Megs of Video RAM (and there's no option to change that, unless you use the Hybrid BIOS). You also need to disable Acceleration by adding "Option NoAccel". Attached to this Wiki-Page is a fully functional xorg.conf file that works with Fedora Core 6.

IOpener File Archives

These files are simply mirrored here for everyone's convenience. If there are any files that are offensive or are infringing on anyone's copyrights, please let me know ASAP by clicking on "New Ticket" above. Thanks!