Today was HP day again. Kinda like Christmas, HP day is when I wake up to some new HP hardware in a box under the mailbox on the porch. For some reason, HP keeps sending me hardware, and this time they shipped me a HP t5725.

It's kinda funny what's called a "thin client" these days. This box has 512 mb of flash memory, no moving parts, and is silent. Other than that it's a fullfledged desktop machine in a very nice smallish package.

The OS is a very lightly modified Debian sarge. They did a good job at adding their tweaks without getting in the way of Debian. I was able to install whatever additional packages I wanted on the hundred+ megabytes of free space. Most users will probably be perfectly happy with the preinstalled system, you can surf the web, etc.

This was one of the few preinstalled systems that I've actually used for more than 10 minutes without wanting to blow it away with my own custom install. If felt sorta silly to do so, but I'm installing testing on it right now via netboot.

... That went fine, no issues whatsoever. Though on a system with this size disk, tasks are useless and every package must be hand-picked right down to the xorg video driver packages.

So it really is a thin client for me, NFS root is a good way to go, and means that I have a machine on my desk that I can use as a workstation, and easily reboot to use as a d-i and rootsync testbed, without worrying about preserving the contents of its disk.