Did you try this?

http://www.slitaz.org/en/about/

Ha, these costs ~$350 I could have done this and more with a Raspberry Pi

This is a rollout of new equipment for our new inventory system.  All these things need to do is launch a Citirix Receiver.  They can do it with a wire, but I'm not running wire to 50 machines spread over God's creation!

I did indeed.

I ran it for a while on an old K6-II pc. It's an interesting little distro that (if nothing else) shows how bloated things have become.

Here's what someone had to do to get it running on a tc with only 512MB flash (I dunno about wifi though):
http://forum.slitaz.org/topic/installing-slitaz-on-thin-client-t5545

Probably would have run those cables by now!

 :-((

True though!

Ken: will wifi be reliable on 50 units? With cheap small adapters?

I dunno. But I cracked one open and they appear to accept a wifi card like a laptop. I have a handful of those at home so I'm going to test tonight. I am getting them all in a row and powered on so I can image them once I get this sorted out.

And fuck that on running cable!

Possible to put an msata ssd in there? Bugger space for the distro.

Probably costing too much at that point though.

Basically you need the driver and the firmware. Then you can either compile a new kernel with the driver included (but you'd have to recompile your own kernel every time it's updated) or compile a kernel module for the driver (still probably need redoing for each new kernel but less hassle).

I'd go with a more up-to-date distro than Ubuntu for this. Ubuntu's kernels are very old. Something like Fedora might give you a better chance of the problem being solvable via a third party repo.

 

Ubuntus kernels are numbered 'old', but most cutting edge stuff is/will soon be backported.  In my experience, you stand a far better chance of getting obscure -ish stuff in Ubuntu (often through debian repos) than you do in Fedora. And I prefer and use Fedora as my main distro.

Also I do not advise using latest Fedora release in production anyway (and neither do the Fedora folks!). Better use RHEL/clone or Ubuntu.

Could have got laptops with better spec (including hard drive and built-in wifi) for that money ffs.

I can't really do any of that. These images are HP images and I'm just fucking around in their world. The only way I can get around that is by finding a distro that will fit on a 1Gb flash and support the wifi card, our printers and run the Citrix receiver.

That's what you get for letting the boss make purchasing decisions.

Mine is currently determining the provider for almost a million euros of work based on the quality of the dinner and wine. F.F.S!

Applications, libraries and sometimes drivers might get backported but you can't backport core kernel stuff to older kernels. You'd just end up with the newer kernel.

And since hardware support is entirely dictated these days by kernel version I definitely don't agree about Ubuntu having the best hardware support. Software, sure, since its libraries and architecture are what devs target, but a newer kernel will always support more hardware.

RHEL/Debian being better for production is contextual. The 'stability' thing is broadly misunderstood. They're not 'more stable' in the sense of being less buggy, older software generally has more bugs and vulnerabilities. They're stable in the sense of being an un-moving platform, so if one is building something on top of it, one doesn't have to continually re-write. i.e. they offer stability in the 'stable API' sense, which is beside the point for this application.

Non-buggy stability tends to come with fresh packages and un-fucked-with upstream code, which you certainly don't get with RHEL and Debian. Which explains why Arch is the least-buggy/crashy distro I've ever used.

 

Enjoy the Arch! Never fucked with it.

S'a lot of fun!

Just to update and add closure, because who doesn't like closure?  I ended up having the vendor send adapters that were compatible with CE 6.0.

The End.

You're welcome. Glad it's working now.

Did you wizard on it?