ThinPro 5.2 (5.x) on a gt7725

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CC By-SA Permlink
While the following is generally correct, it has been brought to my attention that some of the ThinPro 5.2 software crashes on the older processor of the gt7725 with a Signal 4. The information below might still be relevant to another model so I'll leave it as is.

We have a client running a couple old gt7725 thin clients, and we have been pushing all of our clients to ThinPro 5.2. ThinPro 5.x does not support Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series chips. The onboard video is a Radeon HD 3200. This means that when the client boots, it tries to enable the onboard video and fails, leaving a black screen. Fortunately this client has this model because they have FirePro 2460 add-on cards, for up to 4 monitors. Normally ThinPro can use both the on-board and add-on cards, providing up to 6 monitors in this case. All we need to do is disable the on-board video and ThinPro will use the add-on card without modification. The next problem is that the on-board video can not be disable in the BIOS, and Debian has no native method of disabling a PCI device.

The solution is simple, add a udev rule so that when udev recognizes the on-board video card it executes a script that disables the card. Just create a file in /etc/udev/rules with the following line ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="0000:01:05.0", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:05.0/remove'". Reboot the client and it works! Sidenote: I used HP Device Manager to enable SSHd, then put the file on the device.