I love simple workstations. Especially if they do what you expect them to – and nothing more. You can imagine that I like ThinClients, web terminals and stuff like those.

Those days I stumbled over ThinStation, a small build environment to do such thin client images. I guess you can already smell the advantages here: Old hardware could be deployed again where you don’t need a huge CPU.

For my current project, I’m checking out ThinStation using their git repository:

git clone git://thinstation.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/thinstation/thinstation-2.5

Initializing the build environment:

cd thinstation-2.5
./setup-chroot

Having those commands hammered into the keyboard, I’m chrooted into the build-environment. The build environment got its stuff in /ts/2.5; build.conf and thinstation.conf.buildtime are the configuration files for customizing the build process. After reviewing those (well documented) files, ./build –allmodules starts the building process, resulting in a couple of images in /ts/2.5/boot-images/ – I used the ISO file for my project, burning a CD… booting.