This is mainly about building and installing OpenWRT on the Wyse 3040. I have included as much additional information as possible.
I suspect this will work for any Intel Atom based processors, though I have not tested it. I don't think the standard images are compiled with Atom support. There's a special flag to toggle in kernel_menuconfig to enable Atom specifically.
- F2 - Boots BIOS
- F12 - Boot Menu
- Enter BIOS with F12
- System Configuration -> USB Configuration, then check Enable USB Boot Support
- Secure Boot -> Secure Boot Enaable, set to Disabled
- Power Management -> AC Recovery, set to Power On
- Save Settings
The current build of OpenWRT does not install on the Wyze. From what I understand, this is due to the default build outputting to Serial. I built my own version specifiying the Atom processor with no serial output and had some good luck.
I'm not an expert on building OpenWRT, this is the first custom build I've done. I may be missing some stuff or could be wrong about any amount of this. Feel free to drop a comment/bug/pull request.
Requirements:
binutils bzip2 diff find flex gawk gcc-6+ getopt grep
install libc-dev libz-dev make4.1+ perl python3.6+ rsync
subversion unzip which
Build:
I used directions from OpenWRT Build System Usage.
git clone git@github.com:openwrt/openwrt.git
cd openwrt
# list tags
git tag
# I'm using the latest rc as of today
git checkout tags/v22.03.2
# Update/install the feeds
./scripts/feeds update -a
./scripts/feeds install -a
# Optional: Download my config
# wget "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pjobson/dell-wyse-3040-openwrt/main/config/config" -O .config
# Otherwise make your own
# Make your config
make menuconfig -j$(nproc)
# Select options:
# Target System -> x86
# Subtarget -> x86_64
# Target Profile -> Generic x86/64
# Target Images -> (uncheck) Use Console Terminal (in addition to Serial)
# Target Images -> (clear out) Serial port device
# Target Images -> (uncheck) GZip images
# LuCI -> Collections -> luci
# Select whatever else you want/don't want
# Save/Exit
# Make your kernel config
make kernel_menuconfig -j$(nproc)
# Select Options:
# Processor type and features -> Processor family -> Intel Atom
# Save/Exit
# Disable DHCP server on LAN
# If you do not do this, it'll try to serve DHCP from the LAN port which can clobber stuff on your network.
sed -i "s/config dhcp lan/config dhcp lan\n\toption ignore '1'/" package/network/services/dnsmasq/files/dhcp.conf
# Do the build, it'll take like an hour.
# It will prompt you several times for several questions
# I use defaults for all.
make defconfig download clean world -j $(nproc) V=sc
# You can find the builds in: openwrt/bin/
# This includes all the packages.
find . -name "openwrt-x86-64-generic-ext4-combined-efi.img"
- You need two USB sticks, one you should put some linux distribution on, the other you should format. I formatted mine to ext4, but it probably doesn't matter.
- Download the image from above or do your build.
gunzip openwrt.atom.v22.03.2.img.gz- Copy
openwrt.atom.v22.03.2.imgto your second USB stick. - Put your Linux boot stick into one of the USB2.0 slots.
- Put the stick with the OpenWRT image on it in the USB3.1 slot.
- Boot the unit hitting F12 to get to the boot menu, then select the linux boot stick.
- Open a terminal.
- Find your EMMC with:
sudo fdisk -l - Both of mine were:
/dev/mmcblk0 - Find your img file, if you're using mint it'll be in media:
ls -laR /media/mint/ - Write the image using
dd. sudo dd if=/path/to/openwrt.atom.build.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=512 status=progress- Wait for awhile.
- Reboot the device removing all USB sticks. I just power cycle it, because I don't care.
- Setup your network as I desribe in this gist: OpenWRT on x86_64 - First Boot
- You can now open LUCI in your browser by going to whatever IP you set the unit to.
- Resize your partition.
- Reboot back to your LiveUSB
- Open gparted and resize the ext4 partition.
- NOTE: DO NOT resize it to the full 8GB or it will not boot, keep slightly under 8GB. I have no clue why. I left 100MB at the end of my drive and it worked fine.
Dell has their own linux distributino for the Wyze 3040 called ThinLinux. You can download it from their Support Site. The file is 2.2.0.00_3040_16GB_merlin.exe which you can extract the img files from with 7zip, like: 7z x 2.2.0.00_3040_16GB_merlin.exe. I have not tested this and I probably won't.
Linux Mint will boot off the USB stick and I have used the Live USB stick to mess around with the device. The minimum system requirements for Mint are 2GB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. The installer will crash shortly after selecting keyboard type.
antiX is probably a better option as the minimum system requirements are 256MB RAM and 5GB HDD. This seems to install and run fine, you will need to write the ISO to a USB with live-usb-maker as the default antiX distribution ISO is legacy boot only.
This person has done some work with VyOS. https://blog.kroy.io/2020/01/17/the-baby-wyse-the-dell-3040/
Requirements are:
- 1GHz CPU
- 1GB RAM
- 16GB HDD
Unless you have the 16GB version of the 3040, it probably won't work. There's an edition of Win10 called Tiny10, which you may get lucky with.