Thin client OS suggestions

debitcardmayhem

Spud , don't be silly don't give it back

spud17

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Spud , don't be silly don't give it back

He [STRIKE]pinched[/STRIKE] borrowed it from his wifes pc, and she's a gurt big Devon maid.

3x t5000 thin clients as a job lot cost me £8.40 delivered, lucky bid on ebay.

Paying out £10/12 for another keyboard is pretty galling.

Incidentally, the one that only works with Windows is a Texet from Wilkinsons (£4.60)

I'm thinking Argos and if it doesn't work, it should be easy enough to return.

debitcardmayhem

spud17 wrote: »

He [STRIKE]pinched[/STRIKE] borrowed it from his wifes pc, and she's a gurt big Devon maid.

Aaah he doesn't need crushed nuts on his vanilla cornet, I quite understand:D

spud17

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Aaah he doesn't need crushed nuts on his vanilla cornet, I quite understand:D

It's not him I'm worried about, she knows where I live.

Seriously, thanks to everyone for their input, and I've learned that all keyboards are not the same.
I've now also got a few decent light weight distros to explore. :beer:

spud17

Just an update if anyone's interested,

Eventually bought the cheapest Microsoft usb keyboard I could find £6.99.
All works a treat, strangely it is detected as a Liteon when linux is loading, :cool:.

Installed SliTaz instead of Puppy, which is now relatively bloated.:)
Installed Lighttpd, bit of Googling and now have site up and running as fast as ever, and using 6.5 watts.

Specs, 1GHz Transmeta Crusoe TM5800, 512MB ram, 4GB cf card via 44 pin ide adapter.

Plenty of thin client info at

http://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/index.shtml

Now if I could only get the remote access working from main desktop. :cool:

debitcardmayhem

TightVNC perhaps.....

spud17

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

TightVNC perhaps.....

Hiya, how you doing?

Been trying that, it's in the SliTaz packages, but even with firewalls off, all I get is 'cannot connect' or 'wrong type of authentication'.
Yes, I've used host:display etc and any other combination I can think of.
Usually no problem connecting from main desktop (Win7 + Ubuntu) to headless, regular (ubuntu flavour) machines using RDP, or UltraVNC.

I'll have to leave it until my next free time, probably Christmas.:(
There I used the c word. :rotfl:

asbokid

Glad you got it sorted spud!

I'm trying to do the same with an old AMD Socket S1 Fujitsu fanless industrial mini-itx motherboard. The AMD socket S1 is quite rare, and it was hardly ever used in desktop machines. The Socket S1 was intended for very low-powered CPUs. It was normally used in netbooks, but HP did use it in some of its thin clients, e.g. the HP5730.

The board is only meant to be used with an 8 watt fanless Sempron 2100, which are extremely rare. However, I found a reclaimed dual core Athlon 64 X2 in Socket S1, but that has a TDP of 20watts, more than twice the recommended TDP for the board.

Neverthless, the CPU is now installed and with a watchful eye on the lm-sensors core temperature outputs, I've been stress-testing the board using mprime (the prime number finder). 24 hours of 100% CPU usage, the dual cores are maxing at 55degC, which isn't too bad. If anything, it is the Northbridge where the heat is being generated.

Like the HP thin clients, this Fujitsu motherboard has no IDE bus nor SATA bus, but it does have eight USB sockets! I want to keep it completely silent, so I installed Ubuntu 11.04 onto a 32GB USB stick, and got it to boot from that. It's a Phoenix BIOS, and there's an option for "Forced USB boot". Maybe the thin client has that option, too? If not, you could install the first stage of the bootloader on the CF card, and then point it to the second stage on the USB stick.

The Fujitsu is not going to win any awards for speed, but it does achieve a reasonable buffered read rate of 30Mb/s according to the hdparm tool.

I did wonder about fitting an SSD drive using a £3 USB -> SATA bridge controller, but the drives are too expensive for the quality of the board, and the USB-SATA bridge would act as a major bottleneck. There is also the problem of powering the drive. The supply would have to be drawn from some undocumented point on the m/b.

Anyway, enough rambling!

P.S. Did you discover the full details of that quirky USB keyboard? What the driver is, etc?

spud17

Welcome back Asbo, it can be good to ramble.

Did you discover the full details of that quirky USB keyboard? What the driver is, etc?

I did write down the details, but have since shredded them, lol.

Mine is running SliTaz, and going really well, it's quite nippy and has a proper browser included, I now prefer it over Puppy for a light OS.

I use a cf to 2.5" adapter and a 44pin laptop 2.5" female to female cable. Currently with a 4GB card running my website.

As for getting remote access, on the HP I was using Tightvnc but having no success, I then tried x11vnc this works one time after each thin client boot.
I tried a Puppy cf card and Realvnc, each time puppy booted I had to create a new connection, and it would work up to a point.
I'm really pushing my abilities/knowledge here. :cool:
I have been trying to connect from Win 7 64-bit using UltraVNM, TightVNC and UltraVNC.
Just to check, I installed Ultravnc server on my retired XP machine and could connect/reconnect perfectly from the Win 7 pc, using any of the 3 programs.

debitcardmayhem

spud17 wrote: »

...snipped
I then tried x11vnc this works one time after each thin client boot.
...snipped

Morning spud, well I guess by the time you read this it will be evenin, have you tried this

the remote x11vnc process will shutdown automatically (or you can use the -forever option to have it wait for additional viewer connections.