What is it?

The Wyse V50 is a small embedded thin client running Linux. The purpose of the device is for remote displaying applications in business environments where the amount of display updates may be minimal. For instance, a secretary who does a lot of word processing and web browsing may not need a full computer. The V50 is a way of saving money on large deployments and using large servers to host the applications instead of tons of distributed high end PC's having wasted CPU cycles.

Hardware wise, the V50 is nothing more than a locked down PC running Linux kernel 2.6.8.1. It runs a window manager called QVWM and a couple other strange utilities. There's a couple quirks, like the main filesystem is compressed with e2compr. Wyse is very kind and honorable when it comes to GNU GPL requests and will happily supply all code and a development environment. It's a Mini ITX via board with 256MB of ram and 128MB Mini IDE flash disk. It's standard X86 architecture so it's pretty easy to develop for. It's a high powered box with the 1ghz via so it can do some pretty amazing stuff for a thin client such as full screen video and fast web browsing using the native firefox and mplayer.

What's wrong with it?

Well not much other than cost. It's a little pricey in small runs but the V50 has great utilitarian purpose being fanless and diskless it's much more reliable even running high temperatures. The money may be worth it to get an out of the box linux system that's relatively secure and ready to go.

So to get to the dirt of the article:
Gaining access to this little device is not straightforward. Access can be acheived in a number of steps.

1. Create a WYSE ftp server (standard ftp server with anonymous access). From here you can setup your wlx.ini and start customizing your box.
2. Once you get your ftp setup, you can start installing PAK packages from their site. Download SSHD PAK and add it to the appropriate folder on your ftp. It will now be installable to the thin client.
3. Once installed add a user and add your public key from your primary linux machine to the ftp folder. From here you can download and install it to the thin client.
4. ssh to the thin client's IP as the user, i.e. ssh kiosk@myip
5. It will let you in without a password since that key is now authorized. Now /sbin/sudo su to get root access.

From here you can use ftpget to fetch more files and start modifying the system to suit.

The system supports USB dongles just fine so I suggest starting work on a dongle. As I said the system is built with e2compr filesystem compression so backup the partitions with dd to your USB flash disk regularly and don't run e2fsck on the main root partition or it'll trash it.

The unique thing about this system is the cardbus slot. You can use a cardbus TV tuner or other card to expand the device to your needs, and then distribute the whole thing inside a kiosk. This solves a ton of business needs since it's already very secure and very enclosed. You could also for instance install the prerequisite libraries, upgrade the glibc to 2.4 and run mono and gtk-sharp applications on it natively. It's all quite reasonably fast. You can install custom drivers for touch screens, etc and easily build a deployable kiosk solution from it without requiring custom Mini ITX builds by a dedicated staff. Thus, such a system might be very useful for non-profits doing distributed kiosks for internet access or something of that sort. Installation of your custom system could be done on site with a USB dongle since it supports booting off USB.

Wyse's Linux Solutions

I just thought I'd share this since other people likely have a similar itch to scratch.