I’ve written blog entries from some strange devices before …

There was a time when I was fascinated with the idea of using thin clients as actual computers.

My “first” Linux box, which spawned dozens of distro reviews and many hundreds of blog posts was a Maxspeed Maxterm thn client that worked so well as a stand-alone PC because it was basically a mini-ITX motherboard and small power supply crammed into a thin box.

I daisy-chained a few IDE data and power cables through a hole in the back of the thin client so I could hook up a CD-ROM and hard drive outside the small box. Adding a keyboard, mouse, monitor and 256MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I was ready to go.

At that point, the Maxspeed functioned pretty much like any other computer. Anything that could run on a VIA C3 Samuel processor could run on the box. That wasn’t everything, mind you, but it was enough to get by.

I’m thinking about buying a new test box — something cheap (I never want to spend more than $50 on any computer), probably in the Pentium III range, maybe a Pentium 4 if I get a deal.

That and the fact that the Daily News is moving a few blocks down the road to a new office, which has me throwing away massive amounts of paper and inventorying all the tech garbage I’ve accumulated over the past couple of years.

In one of my file drawers, I found an HP/Compaq t5300 533MHz 32/64 thin client that I got for about $10 on eBay.

I wanted to see if I could run Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux on it, but once I got the thin client in the mail (hey, for $10 I didn’t do a whole lot of research on it), I pulled it open and saw that replacing the flash memory with something programmable would be difficult. It wasn’t made of off-the-shelf-parts like the Maxspeed.

But it did work. The 32MB RAM, 64MB flash, 533MHz box, with keyboard, mouse and monitor connected, booted to what looks like a Windows CE desktop. Included is a CE version of Internet Explorer (something from the IE4 era, I think), and enough utilities to enable me to set a static IP and get networking into the box.

Not every Web site looks pretty in a cutdown IE4, but surprisingly the thing can (almost but not quite) post an entry to Movable Type 4.1 with relative ease, even if it crashed repeatedly crashing the browser when I saved the entry.

At least it saved. And since the browser starts in about 2 seconds on this little, fanless and completely silent HP box, there are worse things than crashing the browser. I eventually crashed the entire thin client, but it does recover remarkably quickly.

I’d still like to get a thin client working with Linux, not as a quasi-PC with full hard drives but with nothing but solid-state memory. Once I finally get a new text box (I’m thinking something generically Dell or HP), I’ll use the Maxspeed in the way it was intended — almost. It’s flash memory is a CF card (and no, it didn’t come with the original), and I plan to install Puppy Linux on that CF card and run it as a silent workstation, perhaps saving my files on a USB flash drive (or on the CF itself).

Let me just say that in the days before I got my hands on two nearly free laptops, I had a lot of fun with thin clients.

The HP has built-in terminal software in addition to RDP and Citrix capability (I hardly know what either of those means), so I could use it as a non-X terminal (not terribly exciting) or try to sell it for what I can get on eBay (likely).

As for my new test box, I’ve seen quite a few promising candidates in the Pentium III and 4 range. I’d like something that can run 1 GB of RAM, but I will take 512 MB if necessary. I did see one with 1.5 GB capability. I have a pretty good feeling that a nearly 2 GHz CPU with 1 GB of RAM will run things very, very well when it comes to Linux and the BSDs.

I’ve seen some nice things for $60, but I’d rather part with $25, or get something for free. The latter has happened before, and it could happen again.

HP thin client update

Here’s an update on the HP t5300 thin client that I got for the low, low price of $20 on eBay. (And yes, I’m writing this with the thin client hooked up to the network).

It runs the Windows CE embeddes system (in 32 MB of flash memory) with only 64 MB of RAM.

When I was researching these, there isn’t much documentation out there specific to the t5300 — HP docs cover the whole 5000 series, so I didn’t know that this client has its memory hard-wired to the circuit board — and there is no way to add additional memory. That’s problematic, because I wanted to bump it up to at least 128 MB. The IDE input on the board looks like a 44-pin laptop-drive plug (and there’s no additional power leads, so that makes it more likely that it’s for a laptop drive). And that input is very close to the edge of the case, making it look like it would need an extension cable leading away from the side, if I were to insert a Compact Flash adapter. By the way, it has a 533 MHz VIA processor and chipset, and the motherboard is so small besides, I think it’s a laptop-specific product repurposed here for a thin client … except that the non-expandable RAM makes it seem like a thin-client design.

But since the thin client’s BIOS will boot from USB, I can theoretically create a bootable USB flash drive and boot from there without cracking the case. I couldn’t boot from Puppy 2.14 on the USB, but I have yet to try all the available permutations when it comes to creating a bootable USB device.

My best hope now is to a) Use the HP t5300 as a Web terminal with the version of IE 5 in its flash memory (what I’m doing now), try to create a bootable USB drive with Damn Small Linux on it, or turn it around on eBay.

I wouldn’t have bought this in the first place had it not been $20, but for those who want to turn thin clients into stand-alone Linux boxes, make sure you can add memory, and also make sure that you can replace the IDE device inside and/or boot from USB.

As far as the IE included in the client, CSS stylesheets are a little funky on some sites, but I am able to use Movable Type with few formatting problems — this is IE, after all. I bumped the screen resolution up to 1280 x 1024, and it looks great with an LCD monitor.

I’m going to try to update the “image” on the thin client via HP — wish me luck.

(Minutes later) The update was successful, but the thin client already had this update installed. Given that the amount of flash memory is fixed at 32 MB, I guess I shouldn’t expect HP to offer a full-fledged update of the Windows CE OS, along with a IE6-level browser, but it would’ve been nice.

Considering the matter for a moment (during which I was unsuccessful at printing over the network … and this box doesn’t have a parallel port, so the options are network or COM port — I don’t know if it will print to a USB printer) … I could actually try to use the HP thin client … as a THIN CLIENT connected via the Linux Terminal Server Project system.