The 5500 I ordered of ebay came in the mail the other day. I was having a very busy week and didn’t really have time to play with it until Thursday night.
When I first turned it on it loaded windows ce then auto logged in and tried to connect to an Citrix ICA server. After some quick googleing I found out that by holding F9 while booting the T5500 will reset to its default windows cd settings. Once that was done I was greeted with a pretty simple windows interface with Internet Explorer and could browse the Internet and everything.
At this point I figured I had at least a neat toy if nothing else. I was really hoping I could somehow run linux on it which would make it much more useful for me. I went back to google and found that Puppy Linux has a very small installer that could be made to boot from a USB drive pretty easley, so that’s what I did.
Puppy Linux is actually more useful than I thought it as going to be. It ran well enough on the 733mhz with 128mb of memory that it would be more than usable for a simple email / web / writing terminal.
I wanted to try Knoppix and see how that would run but it was 2am at that point so I decided to leave it where it was and play more once I had time.
I’ve sense played with Knoppix on it and must say that it seem a little sluggish. I think the main limit is the 128mb of memory.
I’ll be posting more updates as I move along with this project. What I’m really looking for is something very similar to the Knoppix Kiosk feature. I’m even considering taking the latest Knoppix and stripping it very much down to get a simple X session with Firefox or Konquerer in a full screen window.
That is kinda the same thing I did. I just used DSL (Damn Small Linux) and it worked pretty well. I was wondering if you could send me a copy of the Windows CE that came on yours. I have a t5500 but since I bought it cheap from ebay it didn’t come with the internal flash chip.
I have a HP thin client 5710 and have Puppy Linux on it. I have it set up so a web cam will turn on the screen when you walk by and then display the local weather and news. I find it a bit sluggish but it works well for what it is. I enjoy the low power usage and use it as a web radio. Next I will try it on solar/ battery supply.