Evening guys n' girls Money is tight at work and I'm trying to 'up-cycle' some of our old terminal clients. I have successfully deployed a Digital signage solution over the last few months. linkie I have thus far used Raspberry Pi's in conjunction with this solution, but video playback (YouTube) is piss poor, HTML5 works fine but it's a pain in the arse to keep going, seems very flaky. Anyhow's I have 30+ FX170's sat rotting in the store room, they have a dual core atom cpu, 1gb of ram and a 980gb flash memory drive. I have tried several distros successfully with these thin clients, including Arch and Puppy linux. I'd like to go down the Debian route for consistency (It's what the PI's are using). Anyone know of any sub 1gb Debian versions? We support 3 sites and 2 'must' have video playback, so the PI's are a no go for now.
I think you are going to need some minimal upgrades to make those fit for use as a desktop client. I believe those do have space for a 2.5" disk. Perhaps you can get some bulk deal on some smaller SSD or hard disks (may be possible to use the 1GB flash as a cache), perhaps add another 1GB of ram and on the machines you need good video playback on get one of the Broadcom BCM970015 mini pci-e cards. Since the gma graphics on those units are pretty dire and very high load on cpu for hd playback those would help a great deal. Can't think of any deb based distros that are that light unless you do expert install with cli only.
Cheers for the reply Ivan, Good shout with the 2.5" though, I never thought to check. I bought a few home for my long weekend so I'll gut one and see if I can do any upgrades. I was thinking Debian small install (270mb ISO) and find a lightweight GUI to install? All it needs to do is display the webpage, the occasional vid, run a few scrips to keep it as maintenance free as possible. It's a shame I don't have the next model up, they came with a 4gb flash disk, would have been plenty room for most cut down mainstream distros.
Maybe openbox, xmonad, LXCE or XFCE? Most newer thin clients are remarkably easy to upgrade to full workstations really. For the most part they don't use non upgradeable SBCs so often now.
I'll have a look into them : ) I'm comfortable with Linux but by no means an expert so it's always good to ask around! Yeah I'm quite impressed with how easy it was to install a 3rd party OS, especially as the stock OS was always a massive pain to install when they needed upgrading. I think I'll leave all the hardware the same, I'm trying to make sure I can deliver a finished project and when I asked how much it's cost I can say 'just my time'. They have been making redundancies left right and centre and I hate spending money knowing someone might get the chop
Don't bother with local disks, pxe boot them all if they are the same. As for distro...your own suggestion seems fine.
Aha no worries : ) Went for a persistent Lubuntu install on some fast 8gb USB sticks. They boot up in about 4 minutes which isn't too bad, auto launch Firefox in kiosk mode, display the content from the digital sigange server (even video content) shut themselves off at the end of the day and the bios clock wakes them in the morning. I'm pretty happy with it, the only ******* is the TVs that where purchased do not support a mixture of component audio and hdmi at the same time, so ill have to find some other way of hooking them up.
