The Wyse 3040 is a great little low-power machine originally intended as a thin client. But it’s really just a standard Intel Atom machine with 2GB of RAM and at least 8GB of flash storage. This makes it perfect for a little low-power server for some specialized purposes. However, to use it, I’ve had to work through a few quirks. I’m going to document the process and its quirks here.
First things first
If you didn’t get a power supply with your 3040, then the first thing you are going to want to do is buy a Sony PSP-1000 power cord. No, I’m not joking. You can get the whole power supply, or you can do what I did and eBay a USB A-to-PSP barrel jack cable. I’m running mine off of 2A supplies with no problems. (There are some rumors that there is a 12V version of the 3040, though it might also run on 5V. I’d check the bottom of the unit to make sure it’s expecting 5V before you try this trick with the PSP power supply.)
Start by plugging the machine into power and nothing else – especially no monitors. If it doesn’t power up by itself, hit the power button once. Now wait 1 minute. You may see some orange blinks, the machine may reboot, etc. If the machine settles into a solid white power LED after 1 minute, then you’re good to go. If it settles into orange blinks, then the CMOS battery in the machine is dead. This machine will not boot with a dead CMOS battery attached. Your options are to replace it or to… just open up the box (by prying the plastic tabs on the bottom) and remove the battery completely. If you just remove it, then the box will always have default CMOS settings, which means:
- The machine will only ever boot the EFI fallback path, aka
/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFIfrom the EFI system partition (which is generally fine); - The machine will boot immediately when power is applied (probably a good thing for us!); and
- The machine will not be able to tolerate a passive DisplayPort to HDMI/DVI cable (yeah… odd. Keep reading).
Now that the battery is sorted, you’ll want to try to boot the machine with your monitor already attached. If the machine now fails to boot and presents a blinking orange power LED, then you are trying to use an HDMI or DVI monitor through a passive cable, and this machine will not let you do that by default. You need to either:
- Cope with not having a monitor;
- Connect a DisplayPort monitor;
- Get an active DisplayPort to HDMI/DVI cable to use instead of whatever you are currently using; or
- Use some other monitor to set the POST to “minimal” checks rather than “thorough” (and make sure you have a CMOS battery so it doesn’t forget that every time you unplug the machine from power).
Phew. Now the machine finally works. So you can just install your OS like normal.
What else?
Last things last
If you want the machine to not hang when it’s rebooted, you need to add reboot=efi to your kernel arguments. A good way in Debian is to edit /etc/default/grub and make sure this appears in the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable.
The machine still hangs at suspend for me (under Debian 13). I haven’t figured this one out yet, but luckily, it’s not that important for my use case.
Built-in SDIO Wi-Fi for this machine is not something I have tried. I could afford to lose a USB port, so I found a TP-Link Archer T2U Nano to be an adequate replacement. You will need Linux 6.12 or greater to have a native driver for this; if you’re using Debian 13, you can accomplish that by installing linux-image-amd64 from experimental.
I think that’s it for now! I’ll edit this post if and when I find more stuff. In case you can’t tell from all the links, the ParkyTowers page for this machine is excellent, and will probably help you on your journey as well. Good luck!