Snakeoil Forums

Had a few hiccoughs trying Snakeoil on older hardware and most recently an Hp 5740 thinclient. Either they would boot fine but have no connectivity or would connect to a network on the live cd but fail to boot once installed.
Agent Kith has been most patient and helpful with diagnostics and advice. Thanks !!

I managed to install on an older desktop and laptop using the beta with Broadcom networking.0.1.5-Pre-Release-20161216
Unfortunately my ideal machine, the Hp 5740 thinclient (low resource, flash, and quiet !!), had a very problematic network chip and failed to connect..

Then while perusing an auction site I found a current HP t520 Thinclient advertised at a bargain price.....4GB Memory, 16 GB flash, dual core AMD64 at less than a tenth new retail...

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/thin-clients/t520.html

It has just arrived and despite my expectations (that it would be well used and missing a power brick) it looks brand spanking new, with power brick and even a Linux  os pre-installed !!.

Tested it with a Snakeoil live cd and it connects ! (realtek RA8111 chip)
Installed Snakeoil and boots just wonderfully !! 

Sounds amazing !!  (Using X20 xmos to Sabre ESS9018(k2) Dac.)

Very very happy...
Thanks to Agent Kith for such a wonderful os and fantastic support.

Bob.

Hi Bromf, I have set up Snakeoil Blind testing on T520 with 8gb SSD. I can't get a SSD 128gb to load any OS as they fail during installation. It is working well using usb drive as local music, with access to other pc on network.

Have you managed to upgrade your thin client? How?

My t520 has 4GB ram and 16GB onboard flash so, as that is as fast (if not faster!) than any usb attached ssd, I just run Snakeoil from that and my music sources are local from usb drives.

I saw no advantage to installing on an external drive sorry.

However, on the t5740 which has 3GB Ram and only 2 GB flash (and it's network chip is not supported by Snakeoil) I tried installing another Ubuntu distro.
Initially had the same experience you are as it would not boot from the attached drive (even though it was sata connected internally !)
There were two workarounds.....
1) I could disable the internal flash storage in Bios.
2) I could place the boot partition on the internal flash storage and the / and home partitions on the attached hard drive when setting up with the Ubuntu installer.

Either worked but note that the t5740 uses conventional bios and the t520 has UEFI so may not be as easy to configure.

On the t520 I can boot from usb drives but had to enable the legacy options in the t520 bios....let me know if you need help with that.... I should be home this weekend and could look at the settings.

I'm a believer in multiple redundancies so when I spot a bargain I general double buy.... so I have 2 x t520 and quite happily (after researching and evaluating as much as possible first)  experiment. YMMV

My advice would be that even your 8GB of internal flash storage is enough to run Snakeoil from and, unless you have some other requirements or enjoy the under the hood stuff ?, then enjoy the music...

Cheers,
Bob.

(15-Aug-2019, 04:43 AM)Bromf Wrote: [ -> ]My t520 has 4GB ram and 16GB onboard flash so, as that is as fast (if not faster!) than any usb attached ssd, I just run Snakeoil from that and my music sources are local from usb drives.

I saw no advantage to installing on an external drive sorry.

Thanks Bob, that is very useful to know. Yes 8gb is sufficient for 4gb swap and 4gb os. If the 128gb SSD was the boot drive, the network has access via Winscp. Winscp for some reason doesn't allow modification to the usb so any changes are done by sneakernet.

I ran gparted on usb drive, when the m.2 128gb SSD was inserted and on a terminal tried to update fstab. This failed, reason given: Unconfigured fstab for base system.

I have set the BIOS up in legacy mode, 128gb boot drive is seen in the storage menu, not in the boot menu.

There is a 64gb upper limit on the HP website, and perhaps the bios is imposing an unnecessary limitation on the processor.