I came across some offers of second-hand Dell Wyse thin clients, and I was wondering if I could run SatNOGS on one of them. It has 2 GB of ram and a 1.4 GHz CPU, and given my Rasperry Pi Zero experience I know that should be plenty, but they only come with 2 GB SSD drives.
So I wanted to ask how much file size does SatNOGS take up, and could I just configure it to use a USB flash drive as the observation storage so I could just plug a cheap one in instead of sourcing a bigger ATA SSD drive somewhere? That would completely lift the IQ recording file size limitation given by the RAM and SSD.
And are there some other issues that I may encounter trying to install SatNOGS on this? So far my only experience with installing it was flashing a RPi SD card where everything came bundled together, do you think I can manage to install it on the x86 thin client?
@dereksgc
Sounds like a fun project! The path would be a minimal install of Debian 10 buster no gui then follow the satnogs ansible installation guide. That should keep you under 2 GB. On a side note, I’ve been dumping satnogs data into a NFS mounted directory via ethernet and it’s been working fine (dumping observation data, IQ file and STRF .bin files all at once too). Re: booting from USB, should be doable although you might have to fuss with grub to get it to work. I did this with GOES HRIT (goestools) on a HP x86 laptop for a while, it was a 8 GB stick running ubuntu and that worked fine. I don’t have any experience with thin clients (at least not in the last 20 years 
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You can read about Wyse S*0 here
There is a video lecture in Russian about Wyse S10 bios modification.
Author’s website https://kmeaw.com