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The Transmeta Crusoe Experience (2025)

28 May 2025 - faintshadows

Introduction

This post is a complete rewrite and redo of my old posts regarding the Transmeta Crusoe and the greater machine it is in, the Fujitsu Lifebook P1120. Those posts were some of my roughest posts, and I made so many mistakes and oversights in those that I would be better off just rewriting the whole thing.

To those that did read those original posts, I hope this is different enough that it doesn't feel too same-y. As I've learned a fair bit about this machine since initially getting a hold of it in 2021, my approach to this will be different. I'm hoping to avoid the weeks of everything crashing and nothing booting that I had last time, now that I have a better idea of what this can actually run.

The specs of the machine in its current state are as follows:

As far as I can tell, this machine was one of many used in a school district. There was an asset tag on the bottom of the machine when I got it, but I long since discarded it as it was covering access panels. That does explain the really poor condition this machine is in, though. The hinge is pretty clapped out, and the speakers are very blown. The battery is also shot, though I'm willing to put that on this machine likely sitting dead in a closet for years upon years. The charge port is also partially broken, thankfully the charger has no issues keeping connected. There are scuffs everywhere, and missing paint that I've half assedly covered with some stickers. Some of the feet on this laptop were replaced with fabric, like the kind you'd put under a chair leg to make it slide easier. I moved it to the lid, which had also lost it's little feet. It's not a looker, that's for sure. It's seen some serious usage and abuse. Which is why I wouldn't be surprised that my system has some fault on the board somewhere causing it to be as unstable as it is.

A Recap

In my original posts, I was unable to get this to boot from USB, and had to load Plop boot manager off PXE every time I needed to load a new OS. I have no idea why I couldn't figure that out, I literally just plugged a USB floppy drive (that I have always had) and it worked with zero hassle. Whatever.

I also immediately went to running Gentoo on it. Why was I like that? No idea. It was kinda funny, I suppose. It was one of the only things that worked, but even it would crash randomly. At the time (the first post) I had figured it was a heat related issue, and would later replace the original thermal pads with some fresh, slightly thicker ones. It made no real difference, but at least I feel a little better about the whole thermal situation now.

The replacement thermal pads

After that I tried NetBSD which was as unstable as anything else I tried at the time, and then some era-appropriate Linux distributions. Ubuntu 5.10, Debian 3.1, and a weirder one called AOSC/OS Retro. Of those 3, Ubuntu was the most stable, but it ate up a pretty big chunk of the RAM.

Ubuntu 5.10 desktop

I did run Windows on this, usually flip-flopping between *nix and Windows XP. Windows was generally more stable, most of the time. The issue with Windows that I saw, was a lot of software expecting or assuming a lot more CPU instruction support than there really was. The Code Morphing Software in the Crusoe just couldn't handle it. Even the core OS of XP, when updated to SP3 and beyond, has code expecting newer CPUs. At least that's what I gathered. I did try Windows 2000 for a while, thinking it would ask less of the hardware. The COA on this machine, is for 2000, despite having a XP sticker on the front, so it made sense to at least try. It was about as good as XP was. The issue that made me stick to XP was trying to get wireless internet working. The built-in Intersil chip doesn't support modern anything, and the Linksys WPC54G I was using didn't want anything to do with Win2K.

So the Crusoe sat, dual booting Debian 8 and XP. It was… Acceptable. But I was too scared to try to run too much on there to risk any crashing. Debian 8 was also very uninteresting. Slow too.

4 years later…

It's a new year (2025) and I spent all of 2024 saying I'll revisit this little guy and make a much better blog post about it. I've learned a bit since then, like how the Linux kernel had a bug[1] that caused Crusoe chips to be considered i686 when they're actually i586. So distributions that claimed to support i586, but built the kernel with Crusoe support, would fail to boot. Supposedly, anything shipping kernel 6.8 or newer, with i586 support, will run now. I have also swapped out the 40GB HDD with a 128GB SSD in a mSATA to IDE adapter. This will cause issues, but I don't know that yet.

Installing Windows XP

As I'm writing this beginning part of the post, the Crusoe has been next to me, slowly installing Windows XP SP1. I'm choosing SP1 specifically for the relative lack of *waves hands* stuff in the operating system. None of that firewall stuff, or anything else to get in my way. It's not like this is going online much at all, outside of doing file transfers.

The biggest bottleneck in this whole install process is that damn USB 1.1 bus. I use Easy2Boot for my older machines, since it has a pretty decent XP install deal that can copy the ISO to RAM if you have enough. And it mounts the ISO as a virtual hard drive that the installer can see at both stages of the install. The thing is, it takes upwards of 10 minutes just to get to the point where the XP installer even runs. That's how long it takes Easy2Boot to get to the menus. Other machines I would boot the same USB on, maybe a minute. So you have that, plus the already slow to begin with XP install, it's rough.

The XP install took about 3 hours. I had to leave during it so I came back to a desktop, albeit a frozen one. I dunno what weird ISO I used (I swear I used this one before), but there was no OOBE to set up an account, it just dropped me to a desktop as Administrator. The Luna theme wasn't even installed(???) It also booted up really slowly, something's up with the SSD.

When I went to try Linux, I swapped out the SSD for the HDD I had in here previously. I had another day to babysit the install, and chose a proper XP RTM ISO this time around. This absolutely would have shipped with SP1, but I found a RTM ISO first and that's close enough. I'll likely install SP1 on here as was my original plan, but for now I want to see how far I can get with RTM/SP0. All the drivers I needed installed just fine, I even managed to find the driver for the chipset IDE on The Retro Web. I had never bothered to look for it previously since XP ships one out of the box that works. However, the nature of some of the weird behavior this machine has made me wonder if the IDE controller may be one of those that act weird on generic drivers. I wasn't able to find any other drivers related to the chipset though. But nothing else was missing from Device Manager, so I'm happy. Even the touch screen works out of the box!

Linux

I said supposedly anything with kernel 6.8 or newer should run, but this also is coinciding with most distributions starting to drop 32-bit support. The already thin options for i586 were getting even slimmer.

To spare a few thousand words of failure, I'll rapid fire go through all I've tried so far.

I saw an article that mentioned booting Alpine 3.15 on a 100MHz Pentium, so I thought I would give that a try. It booted to a shell! But I couldn't get it to actually install. It would have all sorts of issues once it got to the point of touching the disk. The partition table stopped updating properly so the kernel couldn't see all the partitions on the disk! Maybe 3.15 is just scuffed. I tried some newer versions on a whim. 3.16 boots, 3.19 and 3.21 fail to mount the rootfs. I think the latter two are expecting i686 and the commands to mount the disk are failing. But their kernels boot fine. Maybe it runs out of RAM, though running free from the emergency shell only shows around 10MB used.

As 3.16 boots, I tried that, and… same issue at 3.15. Is it a bad time to say this is my usual experience with Alpine, no matter the system I try to use it on? I don't know what it is about me, but Alpine just hates me.

I had pulled this machine out when a friend was over and he tried to find something, anything that could run on it, and ended up installing PlopLinux, made by the same person who did Plop Boot Loader. It claimed to still support the 486 and I didn't have any objections. It's definitely a niche distro, one of those strange ones that you do everything as root on. I haven't done much with it, launching X is a chore with not much benefit. I've mostly just used it to poke the hardware and look at dmesg to check the hardware.

And Here's Where It All Falls Apart

I don't have UDMA support under Windows. I'm completely dumbfounded by this. Linux sees the drive and negotiates UDMA4 speeds, all is well. But XP is stuck in PIO mode, and its not running good at all. I've also managed to lose the hard drive activity light? Something's gone deeply wrong here. I should've known when I was having issue installing XP over USB when I had done it a few times previously on this very same machine…

Historically, I was always plagued with random crashes on this. Originally I had thought it was the Ethernet controller on board, as using it would cause the crashes to become more frequent, and disabling it would lessen them. I would just use a 3Com PCMCIA card in its place. But over time I've really started to wonder if it was something else in the machine that was causing issues. In a strange turn of events though, ever since I brought it back out of hibernation, I haven't had nearly as many crashes, and I've been using the onboard Ethernet exclusively. But now I have drive speed issues.

Part of me is wondering if the IDE was the culprit the whole time, and the flex cable that this uses was just interminttent and would break the connection randomly. It wouldn't explain why disabling the onboard Ethernet would fix it, but I never said it fixed the crashes, just made them less often. It could be completely unrelated! Maybe I was just coping and thinking that was the case the whole time.

So I'm kind of stuck here. Linux is basically useless on something this old, no amount of ricing out the install can fix not having kernel driver support for things like the Radeon chip or Transmeta's LongRun power management. Using era-appropriate Linux is equally useless in my opinion, as unfortunately it feels like by the time desktop Linux got decent to use, most things were done in a web browser, or on now dead services. Besides, even when I did, it didn't run any better, usually worse! 256MB of RAM is not enough.

Also worth considering is that the issues I was having in Alpine may have been a symptom of the hard drive cable as well, since it seemed to work fine up until the drive was accessed. The ideal would be to run what it was meant to, XP. But XP is the worst performer…

I could try the drive in another machine, but to be completely honest, I'm terrified of ever touching the ribbon ever again, that thing scares me with how fragile it feels. Having run some tools like HDAT2, they all report proper UDMA support, so I don't know. I just do not have the proper experience with this sort of thing to be able to diagnose this correctly. If I were able, I'm sure I could also spin up a flex pcb to replace the old one, but figuring out all the signal timing for all 44 pins feels very daunting, and there's also the possibility I may damage the connectors when trying to remove them from the old ribbon…

I'm sorry to end this on a sour note, but if this ain't the true, honest vintage computing experience. Don't let the YouTubers fool you, it's all about fixing ancient hardware and accepting the fact that some of it just will not work despite your best efforts. I hope to one day have an epiphany, or find another Crusoe based machine, so I can do this CPU justice. For now though, I hope you enjoyed the read, and I hope that with this post behind me now, I can work on other things that will have their own posts.

Thanks for reading, ~faint

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-2024-Transmeta-Crusoe

[2] https://download.opensuse.org/ports/i586/

[3] https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/486/index.html