Hi
My name is Russell and I live in Auckland NZ. I recently yielded to an impulse and bought 4 HP T5540 thin clients on the local auction site and am looking at how I can run a light weight linux on at least one of them.
I have used Puppy Linux for some years but the thin clients HP T5540 with 128 MB of flash memory and 512MB of DIMM seem to need a lighter weight distro. At present I have a couple of other computers both running Puppy and am still struggling a bit with getting the thin client going.

With only 128MB of flash memory, I'd recommend network booting (either with PXE or with grub installed on the 128MB of flash memory). I have how-tos for either option:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-jessie-37127/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-jessie-37169/

You'll have to slightly modify things to reflect the small size of the internal flash memory. I'd do the initial client Debian install onto a thumbdrive (at least 1GB in size), like this:

Welcome to Linux Questions!

I have no idea if this is of any use to you but it might fit the bill. I used to run SLXT on a Sun X-terminal waaay back in 2001. The x-terminal only handled the video and keyboard mouse interactions, all the system files and data were on the attached host system. The minimal video/keyboard/mouse handling system was uploaded from the host to the x-terminal when it was powered on using arp/rarp protocol. There was no OS held on the thin client.

This ThinStation system might be worth looking at, I assume it operates in a similar fashion.

Hope it's of some use!

Play Bonny!

It depends on what you want to do. For most business applications, some form of remote desktop will have adequate performance. But for a media playback machine, it's better to run locally - a thick client.

Also, if you run a thick client, you can get the best of both - running some applications locally and also running other applications on a remote computer (via ssh X tunneling, or some sort of remote desktop such as VNC client).

My how-to describes how to set up a diskless thick client, but I don't go into ways to remotely run stuff on a server.

I've no idea if the OP would be trying to use this for media playback but I reckon the HP T5540 probably doesn't have enough puff for such a task. It's running a VIA Eden processor which has a CPU mark of 480 compared to 9,995 for a low end 3.6Ghz i7-4790. But then, who knows.
Further interesting CPU details here.

As for the HP T5540 itself, I found this rather interesting website here which has a pretty good coverage of the hardware specs and the possibility of running Linux (Tiny Core) The guy last updated his web page May 2017 so it looks like he's still around and available to answer questions.

So Russell, let us know what you hope to use them for and let us know how you get on!

Play Bonny!

Well I've used a 400mhz Pentium M for a media playback machine, so it's certainly possible. You "just" have to re-encode videos to reduce resolution/quality down to something the media playback machine can handle. I used meencoder and some simple bash scripts to automate this process.

But more seriously, most of my current machines still have a lowly AMD Sempron 3100+. They CPU mark even lower - 452. This is good enough to play back 1920x1080 avi files without any stuttering. OTOH, trying to play Netflix via Firefox web browser definitely stutters...it's okay but not good (other web sites, such as PBS Kids Video and YouTube play fine).

Now, for Netflix it's a moot point anyway because the bloated thing just can't play on a machine with less than 1.5GB of RAM anyway. So whatever...