HP T5135 ThinClient Standard Image Upgrade

• HP T5135 is a thinclient (TC) which can run remote desktop environments that follow the ICA (Citrix) or RDP protocol.
• It is a 100 MB RAM, 64MB flash x86 architecture computer running a VIA processor at 400 MHz. Has 8 USB 2.0 slots (2 housed inside the casing for security) and comes with a VGA port supporting 1600x1200 resolution, a serial port, parallel port, 10/100Mbps LAN, PS2 mouse and keyboard and a 12V connector in a very small form factor.
• Found a local agent who was selling them for affordable prices.
• It came with a standard registered ICA client and the need was to use this TC in a more generic way.
• Found a generic HP image at the HP site: Thinconnect image download
• On extracting this image, this tries to run a flash upgrade utility in the FreeDOS environment via USB. 
• For some reason, FreeDOS that was installed by the HP tool was not able to come up. A 4GB pendrive was being used.

These steps are for an alternative FreeDOS version:

•  Downloaded the image from this site: Bootdisk
• Follow the instructions:
• Basically a single active partition needs to reside on the USB stick.
• Format the usb stick, eject and re-insert.
• Extract the bootdisk tarball and use the command window and do the following:
• xcopy usb-root\* Name_of_your_usb_drive:\ /E/H/I
• syslinux\syslinux.exe -fma Name_of_your_usb_drive:
• Copy the Flash.dd & the ibr from the Deployment filefolder into the USB drive.
• Insert the USB drive into the TC and reboot.
• Once Freedos starts type in this: ibr flash.dd hd1
• This will install the firmware.

The following steps are for flashing the firmware in Linux :

• Used a Debian USB boot disk that was created using unetbootin and booted into Linux on the TC.
• Without installing the OS, 64MB flash image is where the ThinConnect HP image is loaded. Used the dd command to back up the 64MB flash in case the other upgrade was not successful. Linux identified this flash partition as the /dev/sda partition. So one can back up the image by dd if=/dev/sda of=64Mb-part.img 
• On the extracted files on the USB disk was this file FLASH.DD. Turns out that this is the dd image that has to be written to the flash
• Flashed this file to the TC flash by doing this dd if=Flash.dd of=/dev/sda
• Rebooted the TC and it showed the default image with both ICA & RDP support.
• Enabled RDP on a winxp machine and was able to view the remote xp desktop on the  TC.