Yes, the thin client with 16 Gb internal SSD was a good find.
However the pre installed Win 10 was pretty useless because:
(1) It was NOT activated, so I had to purchase licence if I wanted to keep it.
(2) It occupied 14.5 Gb of the 16 Gb SSD, and I kept on getting warning messages that Windows cannot update itself because no space in SSD.
Today I removed Windows 10 by installing Debian 11.3 on the internal 16 Gb SSD. The Debian 11.3 has lesser system requirement than Windows and Ubuntu, and comfortably fits to the one I have purchased.
SLAX OS
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Installed very light-weight OS “SLAX” on 16 GB microSD card.
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Inserted the (USB card reader+microSD card) in USB port of Thin-Client
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Powered up and pressed F9 repeatedly, till boot menu appeared
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Selected USB Card reader as boot device.
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Pressed Esc key to display options.
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Selected “run with persistence”
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Setup WiFI connection, by clicking start menu. Several apps were displyed - clicked “Net Manager” app and setup WiFi through it.
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installed pre-built packages of dump1090-fa, piaware, piaware-web from here : https://github.com/abcd567a/debian/blob/master/README.md
Debian 11 - Activating On-Board WiFi Adapter of Thin-Client HP T502
I am using wired network with Thin-Client and have not plugged-in any WiFi dongle. From SLAX’s “Net Manager” i found that WiFI is activated. This means my thin-client HP T520 has a built-in WiFi adaptor.
I then booted thin-client from Debian 11.3 on SSD. It did not show any WiFi in “Settings”. When in “Settings”, I searched for WiFi, it showed no WiFi adaptor found.
I then adopted following method and could activate WiFi
sudo apt install lshw
sudo lshw
The last command generated a long list of hardware on board. I slowly scrolled till I found following:
*-network
description: Network controller
product: BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
vendor: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
version: 00
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=bcma-pci-bridge latency=0
resources: irq:36 memory:fe900000-fe903fff
Now I know my Thin-Client has an on-board WiFi adapter “Broadcom BCM43228”
I then searched internet for Debian package for above adapter, and found following page from Debian WiKI:
https://wiki.debian.org/wl
I followed instructions on that page and WiFi git activated. Bluetooth was already activated by default.
(1) Opened sources.list file for editing
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
(2) Added following line in the above file
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye contrib non-free
(3) Saved file and updated apt
sudo apt update
(4) Checked OS’s architecture
abcd@debian11:~$ ARCH=`uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,'`
abcd@debian11:~$ echo ${ARCH}
amd64
(5) Installed required packages
apt update
sudo apt install linux-image-${ARCH}
sudo apt install linux-headers-${ARCH}
sudo apt install broadcom-sta-dkms
(6) Unload conflicting modules:
sudo modprobe -r b44 b43 b43legacy ssb brcmsmac bcma
(7) Load the wl module:
sudo modprobe wl
After doing above, WiFi appeared in setting. It is showing “Not connected” because this screenshot was taken before I configured it t connect to my home wifi.
