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Hardware For a Cheap Linux Desktop (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Outside of the limelight of Intel's Core "Skylake" processors is the cheapest model, a $60 Intel Pentium G4400 dual-core processor that runs at 3.3Gz and has built-in HD Graphics 510. Ubuntu Linux results for this CPU show the cut-down Skylake graphics are the worst aspect of this budget processor while the CPU performance is okay if speed isn't a big factor and your workloads don't mind the lack of AVX support. To pair with the cheap Skylake Pentium processors are more Intel H110-powered motherboards appearing, with some also retailing for under $60 while being basic yet functional as a severely cutdown version of the Intel Z170 chipset. If pursuing this route for a budget Linux PC, it's possible to build a socketed Skylake system for less than $200.
Those of you who have recently built, or are planning out a new budget Linux machine, what internals do you recommend?
What do you plan to do on the machine? Program? Surf the web? Use it to monitor something? Play games?
I have a couple of AMD based desktops I use as file / compute servers. Both running Ubuntu and hosting VM's with VirtualBox and running as fileservers with software RAID-5 and RAID-10. The CPU's are 6 and 8 core and were fairly cheap. Graphics was not a consideration and the machines are servers.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I would run a XEON X5690 (6 core 3.46ghz) with 24GB of RAM and an SSD. You can find entire machines with Quadro video, audio, and a shitload of other components for about $200.00
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
I recently picked up an ECS KAM1-I motherboard ($25) for the AMD AM1 processor ($25 to $50). The motherboard has two serial ports and two serial port headers for four COM ports. I'm planning to build out a Linux console server for my Cisco certification rack. This is cheaper than trying to convert a Cisco router into a terminal server.
Naturally the answers provided here depend on the requirements (oddly enough, even geeks forget to state those)
And why reinvent the wheel? Because Pi and like boards exist is the reason this question has almost become irrelevant. You either need something that can be solved with a "cheap" pre-built board, or you're likely in need of $300 or more in hardware.
Requirements matter. Otherwise, you're just fucking around in the sandbox.
I would look at this: http://ameridroid.com/products... You can run both Ubuntu, Android, and Open Media Vault to name a few. It has USB 3.0 and 1Gbps Ethernet along with an eMMC5.0 port for your system drive. I have an older model and it is pretty sweet.
You can get lucky with generic, but I've had too many hard to track down issues over the years that were ultimately caused by buggy main memory chips. Whatever you buy, torture test them first - many tools available. /or don't support all file system functions.
Do the same with the disk - SSD is the way to go, but again do your research since some disk have poor firmware, and
If you aren't going for the top of the line in processing speed, the AMD A-Series will generally get you more processing power for the money than the Intel equivalents.
If you can do with even less graphics power, similar to that of the intel Skylake processors, you could go with the AMD E-Series, but you would see performance loss in graphically intense desktop applications like web browsing and multimedia. If this is tolerable, then go ahead and save the extra money.
As of motherboards, it depends on what you want to do. So long as you don't want overclocking, any of the basic motherboards will do as the advanced voltage regulators really don't give an advantage on low-end processors unless you overclock. However, I'd recommend getting the better chipset if you want USB 3.0 and other features. If not you can go with the basic model.
As of RAM, for an economy machine you want 4GB to 8GB of RAM, and you probably should go ahead and dual-channel the ram if the motherboard supports it, because it will not cost much extra and almost double your RAM access speed.
Nice base system with Pentium G3220:
http://slickdeals.net/f/829851...
Those of you who have recently build, or are planning out a new budget Linux machine, what internals do you recommend?
How about people just build a computer that isn't eyegougingly poor to use. $200 for a machine? Is there even $100 left after putting a decent SSD and 16GB of RAM in a desktop machine?
Cheap computers are the reason people hate computers.
...then go to your local surplus depot for a school system, college, or large company and look for their older high-end workstations and workgroup servers and buy those for very little money, then put your drives of choice in. You'll find Xeons oodles of RAM and if it's a computer designed for a workspace (ie, not a rackmount server) it won't even be loud.
As an added bonus, with equipment that's a few years old you're likely to be able to run Linux out of the box because the early adopters already figured out how to get the hardware working properly.
The only computers I continue to purchase new are portable computers. I buy used stuff for the rest, the last dual-quad Xeon with 32GB RAM cost me a couple hundred bucks.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I picked up an Asus Kabini SoC motherboard and quad core CPU for about $100. I installed some RAM I had laying around and used similarly "laying around" hardware to finish it up. It's not a bad machine although the built-in graphics are a bit slow on Linux Mint and Ubuntu Desktop.
If you just want cheap, a raspi.
If you want cheap and fully functional, get an old thinkpad off ebay.
You want a cheap desktop machine that runs Linux? Why not get a Raspberry Pi 2? Can't get much cheaper than that, and it isn't a bad little machine.
Runs rings around most of the machines I had 10 years ago...
This may actually be a good thought. By one of the heavily discounted PCs (black friday/cyber monday) and just reinstall....maybe adding in some extra RAM.
$60 CPU + $60 mobo + $40 case/PSU combo = $160. Add in RAM, HDD/SSD, I/O peripherals, and you're definitely gonna be over $200. Just buy a cheap laptop (chromebooks spring to mind), wipe it and put linux on it. Plus, it'll be a laptop. Maybe the performance won't be quite as good, but it'll definitely be serviceable.
Getting on Intel's latest architecture is a fairly meaningless goal.
I've been building inexpensive PCs with Gigabyte H81 ITX motherboards, LGA1150 Pentium G CPUs, 4GB RAM, 120GB mSATA drives and Rosewill ITX chassis. I can build a whole machine for around $250. The chassis will still have room for an optical drive and a pair of hard disks, should you want them.
I specifically like the Gigabyte board for having both mSATA and mini-PCIe slots, plus the cutout to add antennas for 802.11/bluetooth. There's just a lot of flexibility for an ITX machine.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Overclockable, similar price. Don't know about graphics, though.
One of those cheap CHIP computers and a hdmi adapter.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
You can still get Haswell with much cheaper DDR 4. Haswell is faster than Skylake per IPC clock cycle. Haswell i3/5/7 4xxx still is the benchmark king for non multi threaded loads. If you are looking at a dual core system then skylake and DDR 4 high bandwidth ram won't be much of a use.
If you want multi cores for database/VM stuff for cheap look into AMD.
Even though I own an i7 I highly recommend AMD for tight budgets as their EFI bios does not lock out virtualization and you can get 6 and 8 core systems for about the same price as an i3?? Sure the IPC for single threaded apps is not all that great but for running GCC, Mysql, and VMWare Workstation/Virtual Box that load works well with skylake and AMD systems. Guess which is more value.
I assume you run Linux to do these things so a pentium is not good as gcc can be run in parallel and everyone who is someone in the sys admin world runs VM's with custom linux applicances like pfsense, turnkey linux lamp stacks and so on for training.
But if you are rich and can afford $2,000 get an i7 skylake and raid 0 SSDs. Awesome performance for these taks
http://saveie6.com/
When your work is 90 percent in apps that are ported to X11/Linux and 10 percent in apps that need Wine, you need an x86. The same is true if some of the Linux apps are proprietary and not compiled for ARM.
1. Get a job
Then what PC should one use to search for a job? And what PC should one use for studies and entertainment before becoming old enough to work as an employee or old enough to sign contracts?
15 years of APK sockpuppetry.
There are some cheap mini-itx/CPU boards that should be considered. They have a nice form factor, and running Linux shouldn't be a problem (at least, I haven't had problems, ymmv).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I just buy a cheap notebook based on the Atom Z3735F 1.3GHz, 2G of DDR and 64G of eMMC. While the processor is 64 bits, the UEFI is for 32 bits only, so no easy way to install a 64 bit Linux distribution on it. First step was to go into the UEFI setup to disable the secure boot, then...
I tried Ubuntu 15.10 32 bits, and the installer don't even boot from a USB memory.
I tried Debian 8.2 32 bits, the installer booted from the USB memory up to the selection menu, but whenever I chose the text or graphic installer, the screen go black with flashing small white lines across the screen, a bit like a old CRT that lost the synchronization.
I tried the last daily Debian installer without more success.
So no chance for me. The workaround was to install Debian 8.2 32 bits inside VirtualBox on top of Windows 10.
My conclusion is that very cheap notebook are designed for 32 bits Windows 10 only and that nothing is tested to allow installing a Linux distribution.
Most of what you pay for a $60 new part is the packaging, QC, and support. Very little of what you pay goes to the part itself. You get more for your money with used parts when you move that for downrange.
The more hard to mate the parts are, the better deal you get. Xeon processor based workstations sell cheap. We recently purchased Dell Precision T3500 machines with 6GB of triple-channel DDR3, and cheap video cards for $83 each. We added quad core 3GHz hyper-threaded socket 1366 processors with 8MB of cache for $20, and SSDs. For about $200, we have usable workstations.
Xeon based servers sell even cheaper.
In which case, one might as well get a Raspberry Pi or Arduino, and install Linux on it, and run
... there are a couple of under-$10 computers out there that fit on my desk.
One isn't available yet and the other was available briefly but it sold out within $24 hours. Accessories^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSome essential items not included.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Celeron 2807 processor, throw 8gb and a small SSD. That's my HTPC and it does high quality Bluray rips with no problem. Running Lubuntu, tweaked and removed non-essential crap.
that microaggression will cost you 30 days of public service, helping clean up the environment! And we will doc your CO2 allowance!
Or get a chimpbox instead http://chimpbox.us/
http://chimpbox.us
I have Linux Mint 17 running on a MUCH lower spec 6 year old Acer Netbook, 2GB of RAM. It's hardly a screamer, but I can get work done, stream video, etc. So I can't understand why your system doesn't do better.
The Pi Zero has Zero network connectivity. No ethernet, no WiFi. Single USB port. By the time you take care of that, you exceed the cost of the Pi2. Just get a Pi2 and avoid the Zero.
The first 2 are pretty much dead, and replaced by FireFox/Seamonkey. Similarly, for the third, Libre-Office is the successor and its source is very much out there. Not sure about Cedega. As for Java, doesn't Linux already have Java support one way or another w/o Oracle having to add anything?
How about nVidia's Jetson TK1 board? It has a great 192-core Kepler GPU, a nice quad-core ARM CPU, on-board gigabit ethernet, all the ports you're likely to need and comes pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
You know that sooner or later, it's a must
Linux? On an Arduino?
Do that and I will se your face on the Turing Award website.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Windows sucks, get a TempleOS Desktop instead.
The V2 B+ pi is pretty good (35US$), cheaper even, Zeros (5US$). Or an Nvidia TK1 (300 TFlop) ~200US$ or even TX1 (1GFlop) ~500US$ using GPU cores.
In desktop performance 'feel' the B+ (Raspian) is pretty close to my icore7 46xx @3.5ghz (Ubuntu 14 LTS). The TK1 is even better, even without using the GPU cores.
Enough people run raspbian on their Raspberry Pi's.
Okay, now put his face on the Turing Award website
The design consideration you mentioned was "cheap." If you have any other design considerations, then disregard this answer.
I come across tons and tons of old, crappy, free, computers constantly. The ONE entity I do actual system administration work for pays me to sanitize, and dispose of, their old systems. These systems effectively have a negative cost for me, since I'm getting paid to dispose of them. Mostly, I like to write software, and not do systems administration, but I don't mind being the (paid) IT person for my family's business.
If you are looking for inexpensive systems to install a low-footprint Linux distro on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux) I think either "free", or possibly negative cost, is going to be the cheapest you can find.
This really depends on how much you value your time, and how much you want to experiment with Linux admin. I've found that hardware failure rates for junk hardware tend to be (surprisingly!) higher than brand new, under warranty, hardware. Which means you are trading your time in dealing with RAM failures, hard drive failures, and a general host of other annoying hardware issues (no drivers for ancient hardware..?) for a savings in money, and learning how to deal with those problems.
Unity + really poor open source amd drivers
And I have Xubuntu 14.04 running on (i) a six year old 2.8GHz Intel core 2 duo laptop with 4GB RAM and Nvidia Quadro FX 770, (ii) a seven year old 2.6GHz Intel core 2 quad with 8GB RAM and AMD graphics, (iii) an eight year old 2.4GHz Intel core 2 quad with 8GB RAM and AMD graphics. It is very fast, especially on the core 2 quad machines, one of which has an SSD. None of them have specs as good as GPs, but all of them are very fast.
Linux? On an Arduino?
Linux on AVR has already been done. http://dangerousprototypes.com...
Then again there are Arduinos with ARM and x86 processors so porting Linux to them is not that big deal. But it is not and won't be a Linux desktop.
What do you consider cheap and what will it be used for?
If you absolutely require cheap above all else then either raspberry Pi or (probably better) an old computer that someone doesn't want anymore.
For a midrange I'd say just get an i5 of some sort and a basic dedicated gpu (pref nvidia, IMO), as well as 8gb of ram and you should be ok
Is Linux finally ready for the desktop?
J/K
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I still got some PII 450 MHz out in the shed I think. Are you saying they aren't good to use as space heaters?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Celeron processor, 2 Gb Ram upgradable, 16Gb SSD upgradable. HDMI and DVI ports, Ethernet and Wifi, 4 USB ports, SD card reader all in a box that is Versi-Mountable. I use an Asus which costs $165 when I bought it a year ago and are now cheaper. Spend more and get an i3 or better processor.
I have, for as long as I can recall, used Shuttle PC barebones boxes for home linux PC's. They maybe a tad more, but the bottom basement version works perfectly with almost every flavor of Linux I have tried. Just add CPU, memory and HD.
I purchased a pallet (about 35 machines) of Dell GX280's for $150 about 5 years ago. Similar deals exist on newer machines. That is less than $5 per machine. I even use them for IC design work. .....
The motherboard graphics are too slow for HD movies (so add a PCIE video card if needed) but other than that they work great for me
I wonder what went wrong - I have roughly equivalent hardware and Ubuntu 14.04 ran just fine on it. I kept having problems with the screen locker, though, so I switched distributions.
My Mint 17.2 XFCE is running quite well on my old netbook, Atom N270 (o/c to 2.0GHz), 3GB RAM and an Nvidia ION GPU, it can easily decode 1080p video using the GPU, even play some old 3D games. Coding/compiling small project is a breeze. Chrome+reddit+RES is somewhat slow sometimes.
I even installed Win10 build 1511 on a partition, and I am impressed it is this quite fast.
You can find this netbook for less than $100.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
TempleOS sucks, get a Haiku OS desktop instead.
Cheap is irrelevant if the machine can't meet the requirements it is built to perform. You may have spent way too much at $200 with a Pi or similar might have sufficed or simply wasted $200 as you really needed a $1000 workstation.
Used Core2Duo machine for $50.00 off of craigslist with monitor.
Sorry, but if you want a cheap linux machine, go used first.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The current crop of HDD is stupidly fast, like well over 150MB/s. Slow latency of course. But e.g. a 2TB Seagate is perfectly fine to install an OS, especially if you don't go with a gnome 3 derived desktop (I don't know about KDE, it's too ugly and is being rewritten again). It's like the fastest HDD you've ever seen, should beats old consumer 10000 rpm drives hands down.
I mean, boot takes likes 10 seconds to an auto-logged Mate desktop (okay, maybe 15 seconds on HDD and 1 seconds on SSD). Then Firefox takes a few seconds to load, as well as VLC etc. But go with 8GB as a minimum and for common task you have gigabytes of disk read cache, so new instances of software you've run before open instantly, etc.
So just get a HDD, esp. if you intend to store things or use some of it as back up storage.
The Chimpbox is no good. It is not a real computer, it is just a toy. I learned this the hard way. I had one, and was doing video processing on it, and it overheated and nearly started a fire. Dealing with customer support was a huge pain. Avoid at all costs!
Yep, I still have an old EeePC901 running Linux Mint from an SD card. It's connected to my kids' Casio digital piano, so it can record and playback using Rosegarden. It's a bit too sluggish for web browsing or other music software such as LMMS, but most else is fine.
My current server system is still a shoebox nVidia ION box with 4GB RAM and an SSD, which makes it snappy enough for web browsing with Chromium in addition to its server duties. I bought it from Craigslist a while ago to replace my tower, and it's much better with power usage for 24x7 operation. The last guy who had it was trying to turn it into a HTPC, but I guess that endeavor didn't go great.
I have a $85 HP Stream 7 running Windows 10... it's actually quite nice once you get a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for it (the touchscreen UI still has a poor adaptation for fingers compared to iOS and Android and is quite frustrating). I'm about to get a couple of those $35 Amazon Fire 7 tablets running Linux, and that's probably the best you can get for a cheap computer, provided you can get the Linux-Installer running on it. Some people have managed to boot it up with a non-Android distro, but the hardware support is still getting there... but the chroot Linux environments have tended to provide the best of both worlds, IMHO.
It's called "A8-6410" but it's the low power chip (Atom competitor, with the Playstation 4's tech).
Perhaps it would run good with Wayland or MIR and an improved proprietary graphics driver.
Just run a 2D desktop instead of a 3D accelerated one and call it done.
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html
^pick a mirror or use a torrent
http://knoppix.net/wiki3/index.php?title=Cheat_Codes
Here's a tip for anybody new to Linux. This is not a brand new tip, Knoppix and other live filesystems have been around a long time.
Burn a [DVD] of Knoppix. Latest update at time of this post for English DVD image is...
KNOPPIX_V7.6.0DVD-2015-11-21-EN.iso 4269898 KB 11/21/2015 2:41:00 AM
Knoppix will boot a read-only Linux install that will not touch your hard drives at all, it is a live filesystem. It reads only from DVD and uses only RAM. The point I was going to make was the boot flag: toram .. Look in the cheat codes above. Basically you interrupt the boot with space bar and type
knoppix toram
#knoppix toram Copy to RAM and run from there
You can use other flags, but what happens is when the software loads it stays in RAM.
This would be common and utmost basic to enter after you interrupt the boot.
knoppix toram screen=1920x1080
It's fast even on cheap machines. It'll work just fine on your 4x SLI GTX980 Ti setups too I'm sure. It's read only Linux that sits in RAM. You can access your hard drives but you have to intentionally take steps to mount them.
Also see these to burn CD/DVD/Thumb drives in Windows
https://cdburnerxp.se/en/home
http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/rufus-portable
I don't care what x86 type hardware your buying, it's all ridiculously cheap. Even if your buying $30,000.00-$50,000.00 servers, still ridiculously cheap. They are toys. It's still pretty standard to buy servers costing in the millions of dollars, without storage.
Egg on your face much?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Get a cheap Chromebook or Chromebox, disable security and install Linux. Since its a chromebook/box Linux drivers should not be a problem. We've been successful with those for a few odd linux boxes that we needed at work.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/PC-Des...
Or ny other place yo by second hand stuff.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Yeah, it's pretty crusty product. The A4-5000 it packs is a slow old chip.
Raspberry Pi Zero. $5 + some source of power + cables.
Are you joking? A8-6410 should have plenty of power to run a full composited desktop.
I can't say enough positive things about the Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition. It regularly dips below $50 and motherboards are nearly as cheap. It has two cores that share a huge 3 MB of L3 cache and 1.5 MB of dedicated L2 cache per core. But, it does not have hyperthreading, but even in heavy workloads or multiple VMs, my observation is that hyperthreading is a paper tiger. I use these processors for both Linux and Windows workloads.
If you need graphic performance you should consider an external graphics card. This reduces the memory bus load. Any cheap "mid-range" graphics cards from three years ago are faster than any of today's built-in graphics.
Kriston
YOU BLEW IT BADLY HERE especially -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
See subject & my last post you replied to Coren22: BIND doesn't come w/ Windows, the most used OS there is by the most folks on the desktop!
(LMAO - I own you... YOU, have been DOMINATED!)
APK
P.S.=> You're efficiency is poor - Less IS truly MORE in using what you already have (hosts + firewalls) as I do, & to do more with less... apk
Coren22 IMPERSONATES RESPECTED MEMBERS OF THE SECURITY COMMUNITY http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
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"privilege escalation's a bad thing" - by Coren22 on Tuesday September 22, 2015
How else programmatically update it?
"requires elevation to write hosts" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday September 23, 2015
Hypocrite later admits it - hosts do vs. WFP/SFP not my ware. Users set it not programmatic impersonation. Security wares need it.
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"secretary at MalwareBytes took a look at his source code & said it looked all good" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday November 18, 2015
Mr. Steven Burn of Malwarebytes
"yes I've seen the code & yes it is safe." FROM http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi...
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"we should avoid your crap it looks like malware." - by Coren22 (1625475) on Monday November 02, 2015 @03:52PM (#50850445)
60++ reputable sources say different:
64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
+
32-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
&
Installer-> http://f.virscan.org/APKHostsF...
MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...
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"MiTM... his software provides" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday November 18, 2015
Hardcoded favs users provide = REVERSE DNS verified & my ware filters 5,500++ false positives - security site hosts data = false positives filtered.
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"Apk doesn't think DNS servers are worth running & believes Microsoft Active Directory can run w/out DNS." - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday October 27, 2015
Show us where I say it? Not illogic logic but where I say it. I say AD needs internal DNS far back as 2007
http://forums.tweaktown.com/wi...
See "To warn users who have ActiveDirectory/AD LAN-WAN setups to NOT use external DNS servers" there.
APK
P.S.=>
"modding you down for trolling in your signature" - by Dog-Cow (21281) on Wednesday November 25, 2015
Dog-Cow's (old acc't. no new sockpuppet from you) thoughts of your signatures about me
... apk
Get the Pi 2 or the CHIP with accessories, way cheaper and plenty powerful for plain simple desktop use. Aside from that, any AMD based system will be less expensive than an Intel based system. Intel is overpriced for low end systems.