I bought two NCD Explora 451 X terminals on eBay for $20 each. They have an IBM 403GCX processor, PCNET-fast 10/100 ethernet and an S3 video chip. I thought thew would make a nice linux based X terminal.

Getting the existing boot prom to read my ELF files required some perseverance but I managed to figure it out. Once that was done I wrote a simple standalong program to test hardware assumptions. Once I got the screen and serial port working I did a simple linux board port, using the current linuxppc_2_4_devel tree.

The box current boots a kernel via tftp and mounts an NFS file system over ethernet. The video does not work yet but looks straightforward. I can see the pcmcia space in memory but have no support yet.

Check out the sourceforge project and contribute!