Before you start looking at software, getting the t5570 hardware up-to-scratch is a good idea.
My t5570 came with 1GB RAM in a single SODIMM slot but I found that this was easily upgraded to a single 2GB or 4GB module to give you more memory. Some models may come with 2GB by default but it seems that the t5570 was pretty unfussy with a variety of PC3-12800S, PC3-10600S and PC3L-12800S all working fine for me.
The flash memory is a bit more of a challenge as you ideally need at least 8GB to get usable storage for a working Linux desktop. You can probably get by with the standard 2GB DOM for a very specific and bespoke Linux install but I wanted something a more generic and capable of supporting a modern web browser and word processor.
You can get larger horizontal (meaning that the memory board is parallel to the motherboard) DOMs but they tend to be rather rare and expensive so I looked at using CompactFlash and SDHC cards instead.
CompactFlash is fairly straightforward. You'll need to remove the DOM unit and replace it with a 2.5" (laptop) IDE to CompactFlash adapter connected via a 44-way IDE cable. You need to make sure that the adapter is wired in correctly. It isn't always very clear, but you should find that pin 1 is indicated somehow differently to all the other pins. I had good success with CF cards and going for something a little more exotic than a Class 4 or 133x ensures that the IDE bus will be the bottleneck and not the card.
SDHC turned out to be a little more complicated. IDE to SD adapters using Sintechi chips are quite commonplace and after getting one working straight away I then started to have serious issues with lost partition tables and cards that failed to boot after shutting down a working installation. Other people are reporting the same problem and whilst it appears to be a glitch in the GRUB bootloader and can be solved by switching to Syslinux I had a working supply of CF cards and decided to stay with them.
At the time of writing CF cards appear to be getting rarer and more expensive so it may be that the Sintechi-based adapters offer the cheapest way forward - albeit with careful selection and configuration of the bootloader.
[ED: There is also a SATA port that can be pressed into use].
The t5570 is a thin client, designed to run a minimal OS and a remote desktop application for connection to a server-based virtual desktop environment. Putting Linux on a t5570 still allows you to do this if you so desire but also "fattens" your thin client allowing it to run applications like fully-featured web browsers and word processors.
So - the first thing is to decide on a flavour of Linux. After some reading I settled on Lubuntu which delivers a lightweight Linux install with the LXDE desktop. At the time of writing the latest version of Lubuntu is 17.10 so everything that follows is about this version.
Getting started with Lubuntu on a t5570 is a fairly trivial process - in my case starting out on a Windows PC.
After running through the installer, removing the USB pen drive and rebooting I was presented with the LXDE desktop which came up at an old-style 640x480 screen resolution. After logging in I had a working Lubuntu system albeit still using a 640x480 screen resolution. Moving beyond 640x480, however, proved to be a bit of an adventure into the very soul of Linux.
My test monitor had a native resolution of 1600x1200 and both DVI and VGA inputs. At this stage it was connected to the t5570 by a DVI cable. I had become used to Linux auto-detecting the monitor and its capabilities and adjusting itself to suit. Not so in this case, and so I set about finding out why Lubuntu was stuck at the lower resolution.
My first port of call was the X Windows log file at /var/log/Xorg.0.log which revealed that the graphics driver I thought would be running wasn't. I had a very minimal default driver running down at "limp" mode. I knew that the t5570 had a VIA VX900 Media System Processor which should be supported by the OpenChrome driver but this was missing from the Lubuntu installation. Ah! Found the Problem - easy fix: Install the missing driver.
The OpenChrome driver was pretty easy to install with:
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
Then I rebooted...to find that I had no display at all. So much for the easy fix.
To find out what was going on I switched to the text console using ALT-F1. The log file now revealed that the OpenChrome driver was now running as intended but that no monitor had been detected. No monitor found so X Windows displayed nothing.
The t5570 has two DVI interfaces (DVI-D upper one, DVI-I lower one) and I eventually found, by trial and error, that I could get a fully working 1600x1200 display by using the DVI-I connector in conjunction with a DVI to VGA adapter and using the VGA interface on the monitor. Hardware faults aside this implied that the Display Data Channel (DDC) was not working under DVI so I starting looking at the various versions of OpenChrome in case there was a software issue. The version of OpenChrome that I had just installed was version 0.5.0.
Having started researching the driver it soon became apparent that OpenChrome, the X Windows driver project which provides support for VIA Unichrome/Chrome9 graphics, was no longer high on most developers list of priorities. The project was now maintained by just one enthusiastic and very practical developer.
The upshot was that full kernel and Linux distribution reintegration of OpenChrome was coming in the future (probably towards the end of 2018) but, for now, things would be much better if I could upgrade to version 0.6.0 of OpenChrome.
I thought upgrading might be a bit tricky as my searches for a pre-compiled version of the driver were without success. With no binary to use I would have to take the plunge and build it myself from the source files.
This turned out to be a lot easier than I thought as I adopted a simple suck-it-and-see approach.
I downloaded and unpacked the source tarball. After that it was just a matter of running the OpenChrome configure script and dealing with the complaints - each time the script complained about something being missing I downloaded it using apt-get and started again. Eventually I got configure to finish without complaint and then moved on to running make to actually build the driver.
Here is the full list of all the commands I used to download, build and install OpenChrome 0.6.0:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install gcc pkg-config xserver-xorg-dev libxext-dev libxvmc-dev wget http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/individual/driver/xf86-video-openchrome-0.6.0.tar.bz2 tar xvjf xf86-video-openchrome-0.6.0.tar.bz2 cd xf86-video-openchrome-0.6.0 ./configure --prefix=/usr make sudo make install
After all of this I had Lubuntu 17.10 with OpenChrome 0.6.0 running on the t5570 with LXDE booting into 1600x1200 on my test monitor and working really well. The issue with the DVI connection had gone away and I was back to using the DVI input on my monitor.
If you are feeling brave and want to move on to the latest-and-greatest test version of OpenChrome you can recover the latest code from the git repository, place it in a "hacking" subdirectory, build and install as follows:
sudo apt-get install git dh-autoreconf mkdir hacking cd hacking git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/openchrome/xf86-video-openchrome cd xf86-video-openchrome ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr make sudo make install
There is probably no reason why all the instructions above won't work with other flavours of Linux - replacing apt-get with whatever package manager your distribution supports and installing what you need to get configure working on the driver build.
Hopefully Kevin Brace's excellent work on OpenChrome will find a home in mainline Linux in late 2018 and, in an Lubuntu release after that, it will "just work"™ but until that time it really isn't that difficult to get your t5570 working on 17.10.
Thank you Richard for sharing the above.
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