Building a Linux box
- Thread starter Ice Tea
- Start date
Soldato
- Joined
- 29 Dec 2009
- Posts
- 7,324
Whatever the GMKTec flavour of the month is, £60-70 buy price and probably a few quid a month to run it 24/7.
In terms of the BIOS, you run the risk as you do with all of the bigger companies. Unless you can get coreboot/libreboot on it etc. I remember Lenovo with Superfish, NSA backdoor requests to Dell etc. Whether or not they have them in or not I don't know. Even IME running on minix on every Intel CPU is a security 'concern'
I'm pro-security, but you kind of have to go full Stallman to get away from any of these concerns. I've just bought a BeeLink SER8 for a mini pc and have another older BeeLink running OpenBSD and vmm/vmd in the lab, never seen anything super concerning, but definitely wouldn't run the included Windows install these mini PCs come with. I know a few have had some dubious programs, crypto-miners, dodgy defender settings etc, but always wipe them.
Pre-loved ex corporate mini machines. Dell or HP are my go to but I would aim for an 8th gen Intel CPU as the oldest. Bags of power compared to single board things and usually the idle power isn't a long way off them either.
This.. depending on what you are using it for
@Ice Tea are you building a desktop/office machine? media /file server? will you be wanting to play games on it, etc, etc.
Sorry for not articulating the topic very well.
I wanted to start a general discussion on the hardware people use for their builds, whatever the purpose they had in mind.
Most Linux sections of forums tend to be about software, so I thought it would be interesting to cover the hardware side of things.
I wanted to start a general discussion on the hardware people use for their builds, whatever the purpose they had in mind.
Most Linux sections of forums tend to be about software, so I thought it would be interesting to cover the hardware side of things.
Pre-loved ex corporate mini machines. Dell or HP are my go to but I would aim for an 8th gen Intel CPU as the oldest. Bags of power compared to single board things and usually the idle power isn't a long way off them either.
I did a gaming build. Stuck to AMD platform (AM4) and GPU and it’s been breezy. Mini-ITX form factor. NixOS as a base then just Steam, Proton/Wine and Lutris. GNOME/Wayland has also supported VRR on the setup too for a while. Very happy with it all.
One downside I've noticed to this BeeLink box, the wifi performance is absolutely shocking, and it looks like it's a fairly normal issue.
I didn't test the performance on Windows, but alas until I get the cabling wired up from downstairs, this won't be able to work for my daily driver. I actually ran into a problem trying to download from a repo with curl timeout (Operation too slow) which was interesting.
Fortunately, I still have my trusty mini-itx build, but it's footprint is significantly larger than this. But it has much better wifi.
I didn't test the performance on Windows, but alas until I get the cabling wired up from downstairs, this won't be able to work for my daily driver. I actually ran into a problem trying to download from a repo with curl timeout (Operation too slow) which was interesting.
Fortunately, I still have my trusty mini-itx build, but it's footprint is significantly larger than this. But it has much better wifi.
That's one reason to choose a relativley modern ex-office refurb PC over a 'designer' ultra SFF box - you can upgrade the hardware just like a windows PC if you want to.
It's a bigger box though, so it really depends whatyou want.
Yeah I've got a perfectly fine rig built in a NZXT H1, which is obviously much bigger than these mini PCs, and I could transplant the innards into a much smaller ITX case, other than the fact I despise building in them. Although on this model the wifi is upgradeable, it's not all on-board soldered stuff.
I am re-wiring the house soon, so will be flooding each room with cat 6, but alas that could take a while yet. This can go into the mini rack to be another box in the lab.