Debian on Second Generation HP Thin Clients - t5725

Introduction

This is a second generation of "much improved" HP thin client. It has a Geode CPU and is shipped running Debian 4.0 out of the box.

Hardware

The system uses a miniITX motherboard with a custom cooling solution. The heatsinks on it are BIG and frankly are an overkill for the thermals produced by the Geode CPU and the SiS? chipset. While th SiS? chipset was reasonably reliable using 4.0 it is a pandora box with Lenny.

00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 741/741GX/M741 Host (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS AGP Port (virtual PCI-to-PCI bridge)
00:02.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS963 [MuTIOL Media IO] (rev 25)
00:02.1 SMBus: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS961/2 SMBus Controller
00:02.5 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE]
00:02.7 Multimedia audio controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] AC'97 Sound Controller (rev a0)
00:03.0 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.1 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.2 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 2.0 Controller
00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 8d)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661/741/760 PCI/AGP or 662/761Gx PCIE VGA Display Adapter

The CPU has multiple cpufreq frequencies and throttling it down has clear effect on its reported thermals. However, the big power consumption contributor in the design is not the CPU - it is the SiS? chipset. It generates most of the 20W produced by the system and changing the CPU frequency has little effect on that..

The SODIMM slot is using standard DDR 2700 so if you intend to use yours as a workstation, not an X-term you might as well up the memory to a the maximum supported 1G.

Running Diskless

The system is reasonably happy running diskless. Provided that 1G of RAM is enough for what you use it for you should be "happy ever after".

For more details see the DebianDiskless section

Caveats

The onboard AGP SiS? which was perfectly fine with Debian 4.0 is a total nightmare with 5.0. It will coredump when switching video modes and is practically unusable in the default configuration. The only way of using it is to run in conjunction with the SiS? framebuffer driver. That however buggers XV. As a result an attempt to run mplayer or vlc will result in an endlessly "blinking" display which can be cured only by restarting X. As a result I will probably get rid of it at some point and replace them with ION Atom based workstations or go back to the previous HP model and use that as an X-term.