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.

One of the main reasons we are looking for something better is we seem to be going through cdroms about one every 5 months. That in itself isn’t a huge problem the larger problem is that we’re looking for something that doesn’t cost $300.00 for a new terminal. We actually talked about using the Linux Terminal Server Project but the Point Of Sale server is a 500mhz soekris net5501 and we didn’t think it would handle running its normal server duties along with X and KDE for 5 clients at a time.

I’m kind of hoping that I can get the thin client into some sort of kiosk mode then have use Internet explorer to load the same pos.store.domain.tld un full screen window. One thing that I’m a little concerned about after doing some research, which I should have really done before I ordered anything, but its too late for that, is that the one I ordered runs Windows CE 4.20 which seems to have a ghetto version of Internet explorer. From what I’ve read I think I would be better off with a thin client that runs Windows XP embedded.

I’ll actually be posting more as I work through this in hopes that someone elise could use this information too.