Dyne:III runs fine on the VM8000, providing you have at least 256MB ram. Some of the VM8000 were sold with only 128 MB ram but one can still buy online PC100 sodimm SDRAM 256MB modules (2012-01-28) for around 9.9€ a piece. The VM8000 will accommodate two modules (situated under the keyboard and secured by three small spring pins).

The test machine has a total of 512MB PC-100 SDRAM. That's the maximum supported, according to vendor specification.

The VM8000 graphic adapter is a sis 630/730. There was no 3D acceleration available during the tests.

Resolution is 1024x768x32. 2D graphics work fine.

Sound chipset is showing as a SiS PCI Audio Accelerator (rev 02). "Out of the box " tests showed positive.

Touchpad is fully supported. Click on touch is available, as is vertical scroll on the right part of the touchpad.

During the tests, videos (DIVX and AVI) were played and were perfectly fluid.

The Samsung VM8000 is not capable of booting from USB and though it is featuring a CD-ROM player, Dyne:III is 1.6 GB and will not fit on a CD.

This can be worked around using a boot manager providing minimal system functionalities, which include USB drivers.

We will assume that you already have a bootable Dyne:III USB stick. If it is not the case please refer to the Dyne:III documentation.

You may also consult : http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net. UNetbootin is multiplatform and provides users with a quick and efficient way to make your own live USB sticks. UNetbootin is released under GPLV2 licence.

This howto relies on Plop, which licence is not GPL though it's free for non commercial use.

Plop page can be found here : http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html.

Follow the instructions from http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#noinstall to burn the bootable media of your choice. The VM8000 leaves you two options : floppy or CD-ROM.

Follow the instructions given in paragraph : "Run from Floppy with a disk image" or in paragraph : "Run from CD with an ISO file", depending on the media you wish to use to boot. This will ensure you do not install anything on your hard drive boot record, which would overwrite any instance of an existing bootloader (i.e. GRUB).

Let's insist on this point : If you already have a boot manager installed on your hard drive, make sure you do not overwrite it.

Once you have both your USB stick plugged-in and a bootable media, simply insert the latter in the corresponding slot and start your VM8000.

Select USB in the menu and press enter. Watch Dyne:III gently boot and relax.