I got this and answered yes.
 

 apt-get install firmware-realtek
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  firmware-realtek
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 615 not upgraded.
Need to get 215 kB of archives.
After this operation, 493 kB of additional disk space will be used.
WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
  firmware-realtek
Install these packages without verification [y/N]?

That's fine. Do changes stick after reboot?

I imagine there's something relating to the WiFi under dmesg

Yeah they do if I enable the write filter before I reboot.

You'd think there would be something in dmesg about it, but you'd be wrong!

Did you get it working?

Nope, I stopped trying.  I'm now trying to figure out how to install a driver onto WinCE

Hmph. I wonder if you would have been better off with a bog-standard lubuntu or xubuntu install than that thinpro horseshit.

I've tried about 15 tiny distros.  I was only able to get the wifi working with 1 of them.  And that distro was too big to fit on the flash media in the TC.

What is it, a gig?

Yeah.  The amount of money you spend for these things and what you actually get for that money is insane.

I hope your boss didn't pay north of 100 bucks per. What's the upside to this deal?

Did you try this?

http://www.slitaz.org/en/about/

Ha, these costs ~$350 I could have done this and more with a Raspberry Pi

This is a rollout of new equipment for our new inventory system.  All these things need to do is launch a Citirix Receiver.  They can do it with a wire, but I'm not running wire to 50 machines spread over God's creation!

I did indeed.

I ran it for a while on an old K6-II pc. It's an interesting little distro that (if nothing else) shows how bloated things have become.

Here's what someone had to do to get it running on a tc with only 512MB flash (I dunno about wifi though):
http://forum.slitaz.org/topic/installing-slitaz-on-thin-client-t5545

Probably would have run those cables by now!

 :-((

True though!

Ken: will wifi be reliable on 50 units? With cheap small adapters?

I dunno. But I cracked one open and they appear to accept a wifi card like a laptop. I have a handful of those at home so I'm going to test tonight. I am getting them all in a row and powered on so I can image them once I get this sorted out.

And fuck that on running cable!

Possible to put an msata ssd in there? Bugger space for the distro.

Probably costing too much at that point though.

Basically you need the driver and the firmware. Then you can either compile a new kernel with the driver included (but you'd have to recompile your own kernel every time it's updated) or compile a kernel module for the driver (still probably need redoing for each new kernel but less hassle).

I'd go with a more up-to-date distro than Ubuntu for this. Ubuntu's kernels are very old. Something like Fedora might give you a better chance of the problem being solvable via a third party repo.