HP TC replaced with Igel
Posted at 2017-05-13.
I have a pile of thin clients from a nearby business.
I set up the only working HP one as a little networked computer. It was fun to run, but very slow if you tried to use a web browser. Some time ago, I tried to boot it after a fairly long pause and it seemed to be completely dead. I brought in the Igel M330C to replace it. It should be a bit faster, too.
The Igel has a nice small 2 GB SATA SSD, 1 GB of RAM and USB3 ports.
The Igel SSD
I had installed Debian on the Igel before, so it was ready to boot. Only there was no wifi, sound, or display.
I upgraded to Debian testing by apt. Kernel goes up to 4.9.0 from some 3 version and X and things get considerable updates. Openchrome works with the "VIA Technologies, Inc. VX900 Graphics [Chrome9 HD]". No DRI, though.
I had noted that the system had ALSA with snd_hda_codec_realtek.
There was no reaction to alsamixer or anything else, though.
After poking around, I noticed there's a strange blank card0 and the
main chip is card number one.
I set the default card in .asoundrc:
defaults.ctl.card 1;
defaults.pcm.card 1;
And had mpv playing Kohina in no time. The mixer pretty much only contains master volume and mic, though.
A ralink dongle, firmware, wpa_supplicant.conf and
$ sudo systemctl enable systemd-networkd
$ sudo systemctl enable systemd-timesyncd
$ sudo systemctl enable systemd-resolved
$ sudo systemctl enable wpa_supplicant@wlan0
And wifi works, too.
Space ends up pretty tight after installing some software with only 300M or so free on root.
Too bad about the HP. Those were pretty much dead when I got them and I guess the one only worked by accident until it didn't. Oh, well.