HP t5540 again: netinstall of Debian on a SSD

I already talked about this thin client

Everything worked fine but the case was a bit hotter than I would have liked with a SATA HD crammed inside. So I decided to buy a SSD to play a bit.

The SSD is nothing to write home about: a KingDian S100, 8GB.

I disassembled it because I didn’t want to install a mostly empty case inside the t5540.

Everything worked almost fine, but I had some problem to netboot the thinclient. After having configure dnsmask for dhcp and tftp, for whatever reason it didn’t want to correctly load pxelinux.0

I ended up using the configuration that worked to netboot a V20z (it was a CentOS install) changing some bits here and there because I wanted Debian on the t5540.

I can say that netbooting is really nifty when it works… just install dnsmask, set it up as a dhcp and tftp server, create the directory you need and put the netinstall files inside. Then understand why the thin client happily accepts its ip address but refuses to load vmlinuz after having got the pxelinux.0 it likes.

And then a quick hack to give the thin client internet access to do the real install.

However now the t5540 happily reports that its OS is Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch), the kernel is Linux 4.9.0-4-686-pae and everything is fine again so it is ready to do some work.

I wonder that I am going to install and try on the thin client… ufw, nodejs, sensors…

A.C.

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