At Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:38:20 -0400 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
I got my hands on a HP t5720. This was designed as a thin-client workstation (originally Windows XPembedded, talking to a Windows terminal server). It's not very powerful, with an AMD Geode NX 1500 (1.0 GHz), 256Mb RAM (16MB used for video) and a 512Mb flash "hard disk".
I plugged in a USB DVD drive and was able to boot "linux rescue" from a C5.4 32bit disk, and it basically looks like pretty generic PC hardware.
So I thought this would be a great device to build as an "instant on" type device. Well, as close to instant-on as possible :-) This probably means a standard C5 build is not suitable (too many processes running; would take a while to start up). So an "X terminal", maybe.
I look at the LTSP code base, but this looks like it wants to run as it's own OS; I already have a C5 server in my house, I don't want to build another one (not even as a virtual image).
Acting as an X terminal, I'd guess the 256Mb RAM should be sufficient; it won't be processing much beyond the display locally (although I might want to enable ssh and add a locally connected printer). The root disk could be local (512Mb flash) or by NFS.
What do people recommend for building this? What would have the quickest power-on-to-ready time?
You will *probably* find LTSP's performance disapointing, depending on how beefy your server box is (and what else it is doing) and/or how many of these little boxes you plan to use.
See
http://www.deepsoft.com/2009/08/setting-up-thin-clients-at-the-wendell-free-...
for a detailed look at what I set up at the Wendell Free Library. The machines come up pretty fast.