  In preparation of lattice studies of the two-color QCD phase diagram we study
chiral restoration and deconfinement at finite temperature with two flavors of
staggered quarks using an RHMC algorithm on GPUs. We first study unquenching
effects in local Polyakov loop distributions, and the Polyakov loop potential
obtained via Legendre transformation, in a fixed-scale approach for heavier
quarks. We also present the chiral condensate and the corresponding
susceptibility over the lattice coupling across the chiral transition for
lighter quarks. Using Ferrenberg-Swendsen reweighting we extract the maxima of
the chiral susceptibility in order to determine pseudo-critical couplings on
various lattices suitable for chiral extrapolations. These are then used to fix
the relation between coupling and temperature in the chiral limit.
