Installing Debian on HP t5325

The HP t5325 is not supported in Debian. If you follow these instructions you'll end up with a system that does not boot.

Configure the device

First of all, you have to use the HP operating system to change some settings. Start the HP system, click on the HP logo and choose Administrator/User Mode Switch. Enter the administrative password (in my case, this was root). Then go to the ThinPro Control Center, open Control Panel, go to Management and then click on SSHD Manager. Enable Enable Incoming Secure Shell Access and click on OK.

Then go to System Information in the ThinPro Control Center, choose Network and write down the IP address for eth0.

From another system, connect to your HP t5325 via SSH. Login as root. Now you have to change the thinpro environment variable. We want to change the load address from 0x200000 to 0x800000 so it's possible to load Debian. If you make a mistake here, you may need a serial console to recover, so please make sure you type exactly what is written here:

fw_printenv thinpro
fw_setenv thinpro 'ide reset; ext2load ide 0:1 0x800000 /boot/uImage; wol; setenv bootargs ${thinpro_bootargs}; bootm 0x800000'
fw_printenv thinpro

The fw_printenv calls are there so you can verify that only the load address was changed from 0x200000 to 0x800000.

Now shut down the device.

Loading Debian installer

Format a USB stick with VFAT, create a directory called boot and download the installer files to this directory.

Connect the USB stick to the HP device and press power. After a second, press power again so the device will load the image from USB. Debian installer will now load.

Installation

Beware:

Partitioner: make a single ext2/ext3 partition. The partitioner will complain that there's no swap space but just ignore this.
Software selection: deselect everything, including Standard system utilities; there is not enough space.

After installation

The system will fail to boot. Maybe we have to modify thinpro_bootargs too?

apt clean