hzdr/thinstation upstream pull request

The following are pull requests for the original thinstation:master repository. The attached changes are part of the hzdr:master fork of 'thinstation' and should include minor fixes for several things in thinstation. In addition, it proposes a minor update of the intel-microcode package.

It would be great if these requests could be applied to the original thinstation repository on github. And they are of course open for discussions. Please also note that there might be more interesting changes we applied to our hzdr:master branch. Most of them are specific to our needs, but some may be interesting for the general thinstation user as well. Feel free to ask.