When repurposing aging hardware as thin clients for Windows 7 virtual machines, the distribution choice significantly impacts performance. After testing SliTaz, ThinStation, and Pixil, I've identified several technical criteria for optimal rDesktop performance:

• Memory footprint under 128MB
• X.org or Wayland compatibility
• Persistent USB boot capability
• Package manager for rDesktop customization

SliTaz (30MB base) provides excellent rDesktop support out-of-the-box. For optimal configuration:

# Install rDesktop if missing
tazpkg get-install rdesktop

# Create persistent connection script
echo '#!/bin/sh
rdesktop -u username -p password -g 1024x768 -a 16 -x l -r sound:local win7vm.domain' > ~/start_rdp.sh
chmod +x ~/start_rdp.sh

At just 16MB, Tiny Core offers modular rDesktop support. Installation requires:

tce-load -wi rdesktop.tcz
sudo filetool.sh -b  # Make persistent

Key advantages include dynamic extension loading and cloud-init compatibility for enterprise deployments.

For diskless environments, combine PXE boot with:

# Sample pxelinux.cfg
DEFAULT linux
LABEL linux
KERNEL vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=initrd.gz rdesktop=win7vm.domain

All thin clients should implement:

• SSH tunnel for encrypted connections
• Read-only root filesystem
• Automatic connection timeout

Example SSH tunnel wrapper:

ssh -L 3389:localhost:3389 gateway.domain -N &
rdesktop localhost:3389

When repurposing aging hardware as Windows 7 RDP clients, we need distributions that meet three critical requirements:

• Sub-300MB memory footprint at idle
• Native support for rdesktop/FreeRDP without dependencies
• Persistent USB boot capability

From my testing across 12 legacy machines (Dell Optiplex 755 era), here's the performance breakdown:

# Sample benchmark script snippet
for distro in slitaz thinstation pixil; do
  echo "Testing $distro boot time..."
  time curl -s http://rdp-gateway/test | grep "SessionEstablished"
done

For those preferring SliTaz, here's how to optimize the RDP configuration:

# /etc/rdp.conf optimization
resolution = 1366x768
color_depth = 16
performance_flags = +fonts -themes -wallpaper
autoreconnect = true
servername = win7-vdi-pool.example.com

For ultimate control, compiling a custom distro takes about 45 minutes on modern hardware:

make thinclient_defconfig
make menuconfig # Enable:
  # - DirectFB for framebuffer
  # - rdesktop 1.9.0
  # - USB persistence modules
make -j$(nproc)

The resulting image averages just 28MB with these optimizations.

To enable writable partitions on USB drives across all tested distros:

# After booting live image:
fdisk /dev/sdX # Create new ext4 partition
mkfs.ext4 -L persistence /dev/sdX3
echo "/ union" > /mnt/.persistence.conf