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I just received an HP t5725 Thin Client and it consumes about 25 watts of power for normal operations. I was hoping for much better! It has Windows XP on it right now, and I can't seem to do much about it because I can't get the machine to boot off of a USB CD. Grrr.

For whatever reason, booting the t5725 off of a CD-ROM works now. I'm trying to squeeze debian etch onto a 256MB disk on module. Will it work? We'll see. It might be possible because I have 512MB of RAM, only used 1% for extra space when setting up the partition, and didn't include a swap partition. As the debian manual puts it:

A minimal base installation, without the “Standard system” task selected, will take 225MB.

Also saying that:

In both cases this is the actual disk space used after the installation is finished and any temporary files deleted. It also does not take into account overhead used by the file system, for example for journal files. This means that significantly more disk space is needed both during the installation and for normal system use.

So while it is possible to install debian onto a 256MB drive, there is so little you can do with it once you're done, its just not worth it. I've now moved on to installing over the 512MB compact flash card that originally had Windows on it.

Using powernow-k7, I've been able to reduce power consumption down to 19 watts. Still not that great. But the processor does have pretty good stats. Not as good at the celeron 215, but better than the c7:

CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line)
CPU: L2 Cache: 256K (64 bytes/line)

To help prevent the flash from getting written to too many times, I'm using this fstab addition:

tmpfs             /tmp             tmpfs     defaults,noatime 0 0
tmpfs             /var/lock         tmpfs     defaults,noatime 0 0
tmpfs             /var/log         tmpfs     defaults,noatime 0 0
tmpfs             /var/run         tmpfs     defaults,noatime 0 0
tmpfs             /var/tmp         tmpfs     defaults,noatime 0 0

Here's the output of df -h after a localepurge:

/dev/mapper/vg-lv     380M  218M  154M  59% /
tmpfs                 245M     0  245M   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M   44K   10M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 245M     0  245M   0% /dev/shm/dev/hda1              89M  6.8M   77M   9% /boot
tmpfs                 245M     0  245M   0% /tmp
tmpfs                 245M     0  245M   0% /var/lock
tmpfs                 245M   88K  245M   1% /var/log
tmpfs                 245M   32K  245M   1% /var/run
tmpfs                 245M     0  245M   0% /var/tmp

Thanks to:

https://www.openfiler.com/.../viewtopic.php?pid=4082 (scroll down)

It is interesting to note here that the t5725 offers the ability to schedule wake up times via the BIOS. That is really cool! I thought only Macs knew how to do that.

¥