“Raspberry Pi boards are hard to get, probably also next year,” says Andreas Spiess, single-board enthusiast and YouTuber, in his distinctive Swiss accent. He’s not wrong. Spiess says he and his fellow Pi devotees need “a strategy to survive” without new boards, so he suggests looking in one of the least captivating, most overlooked areas of computing: used, corporate-minded thin client PCs.
Spiess’ Pi replacements, suggested and refined by many of his YouTube commenters and Patreon subscribers, are Fujitsu Futros, Lenovo ThinkCentres, and other small systems (some or all of which could be semantically considered “thick clients” or simply “mini PCs,” depending on your tastes and retro-grouch sensibilities). They’re the kind of systems you can easily find used on eBay, refurbished on Amazon Renewed, or through other enterprise and IT asset disposition sources. They’re typically in good shape, given their use and environment. And compared to single-board enthusiast systems, many more are being made and replaced each year.
A project I want to undertake is set up an UltraSPARC machine, and then tie several Sun Rays to them. I also want to mess around with using Linux as the host for several thin clients – they’re so cheap, and it seems like they’re really fun to mess around with.
I’m trying to repurpose a Lenovo Chromebox which is in the same category (2x core Celeron with 16GB SSD), and lack of RPis is one reason why I’m attempting the project.
So far I’ve flashed Coreboot, and figured out it doesn’t recognized my keyboard or USB boot drives. :\
Something the article doesn’t touch on is how OpenWRT is the only thing which may run on many perfectly capable devices. I have a GL.iNet Beryl at work running as an access point, and it would be a nice little alternative if something besides OpenWRT could be installed on it.
There are also several Linksys WRT3200 routers in the mix which would be more useful with a full Linux distro or BSD OS.
I guess the bigger story is the perfectly capable hardware on the market which is nerfed because only the factory OS and OpenWRT run on it.
Netbooks might also be a good choice as the last ones they made before Chromebooks became a thing have actual SATA drives instead of eMMC garbage and expandable memory. Many of the EEE PCs and some of the HP and Dell netbooks could go up to 8GB of RAM and with a lightweight Linux on them? They are actually pretty snappy.
BTW if anybody comes across an AMD APU based netbook it took me TWENTY-TWO fricking Linux distro installs to find one that worked with hardware acceleration, but I can report Q4OS does work on all of the older AMD APUs like a champ. And considering how many of those netbooks are out there dirt cheap? Might be worth taking a look at if you want something light and easy to mod.
I did this very thing about a month ago. As the prices for SBCs are getting quite large on the wallet now, I did bump into the USFF on Fleabay and grabbed a Dell 9020m 8GB/500GB for £50. I tend to use micro-controllers for anything GPIO, so this works well for a home server.
I installed alpine linux on it to purely run docker and it’s really quiet and works very well. OK, its certainly higher power consumption than one of my orange/RPis , but its quicker.
I expect the prices will rise now thanks to Andreas’ video.
Nice. I have the 9020, 7010 USFF and SFF versions. I looked at the micro version instead of the USFF, but decided to pass since it didn’t have a serial port or internal PSU.
How is the sound under load for the micro?
My USFF desktops work well as small servers, but they are quick to spin up the fan when the CPU load builds up and can be fairly loud. In contrast my late 2014 Mac Mini hardly spins up its fan, and the fan isn’t noticeable in my SFF 9020.
Link if anyone is curious about what they look like.
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000129336/optiplex-9020-visual-guide-to-your-computer
https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/documents/optiplex-9020-micro-technical-spec-sheet.pdf
There’s HP Prodesk 400/600 or Elitedesk 800 G1/G2/G3 that have serial port.
Love this! Especially on the level of reducing e-waste.
Indeed. Another reason I’m trying to save the Chromebox. 🙂
This idea has been bouncing around Reddit for a while. A particular useful resource is this site:
https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/
https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml
Yeah, it’s not a new idea. It’s not something people do regularly though since the price of more capable hardware is better, and regular desktops are easier to find.
I just took a look at the rpi availability and pricing, Yikes! Secondhand Pi Zero W are going for $50-100.
On a related note, I looked for black friday/cyber monday sales, and the prices on most of the things I would have liked to buy are up 20-30% since a month or two ago.
I was hoping we’d be on a better economic trajectory by now. but it seems like there’s the potential for things to get even worse. There’s an alarming rise of protests in china over Xi and the communist party, The ongoing war in Ukraine is creating an energy crisis. Climate change and droughts are creating water, food and even major lumber shortages. Housing prices have become unsustainable. Massive layoffs are taking place in the tech sector. It’s kind of hard to be optimistic about the state of the world. 🙁
The RPi situation is ridiculous. ~$200 for a RPi 8GB versus a refurbished Dell Optiplex with a gen 6 i5 for a little bit more. It’s not apples to apples, so it’s a little unfair. Dollars to dollars the comparison doesn’t favor the RPi. The PRi 400 is the most reasonable RPi out there, but it’s attached to a keyboard.
I don’t think Black Friday deals are that great. Everything has always seemed more expensive this time of the year.
Also, record corporate profits and c-suite compensation packages.
RBG kicking the bucket under Trump instead of retiring under Obama kicked that into high gear. The margins are very thin, and “better” is probably decades away. Of course, the Ds had years to work on this, but chose not to, and aren’t going to be affected by this. They’ll still get to run their little campaigns and be token resistance.
I think the latest ones are in relation to the Chinese COVID policies. I haven’t kept up because Rome might start burning at anytime.
The business class is chaffing over Xi turning to more socialist and communist policies after years of more capitalist friendly policies. This is a good thing for China to be honest. The last thing they need is to turn into the US.
Yeah, the world needed to be on renewables 20yrs ago to safe guard national security and prevent global instability. The save the planet stuff is a nice bonus, but avoiding conflicts over energy resources is the bigger play.
Pure capitalism.
There isn’t a food shortage, there is a lack of people able to pay for food shortage. The food could be distributed instead of being destroyed, but capitalists would start spinning in their graves. The US pays farmers not to plant crops, so we could just buy the food then feed people.
Mismanagement of limited natural resources isn’t a capitalist thing just people being bad at their job. It’s also a problem with capitalism since the market favors cheap solutions rather then sustainable solutions without government regulations or subsidies forcing a change to newer better techniques or processes.
Pure capitalism.
The Gov checking out on it’s responsibilities to regulate the market and provide a fair and equitable playing field for the 98% has been showing for a while.
There really need to be more socialist policies which keep things in balance, but that’s not going to happen because US politics are dominated by people who are some shade of red.
Yeah, there are no adults in the house.
The capitalists weren’t going to let the proles have the little bit of cheese they won during the pandemic, and they aren’t about to let their boy’s loss stand. Time for a recession to take back the few gains workers made and hoover up more capital. Time to block Biden and start building up to a 2024 Trump election victory to consolidate their power.
Flatland_Spider,
Strategically that’s true, but it was her right to do that. Scalia’s case was more problematic though since McConnell stonewalled the proceedings to replace him under Oboma into the next republican presidency. Breyer said he didn’t want to retire and was veraciously opposed to the notion that the supreme court is run as a political institution, yet I don’t think even he could ignore the reality that entrance to the institution was being manipulated for political extremism. Although the republicans failed to get a senate majority, he was set on repeating the same political shenanigans under Biden had he gotten the chance.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/08/politics/mitch-mcconnell-supreme-court-nominee/index.html
So yeah, for better or worse, the supreme court nomination process is extremely political and not very democratic.
Covid is a catalyst for sure, however many of the protestors were protesting against Xi’s dictatorship too. It is extremely unusual for china not have this under control. I guess they’re going to send everyone to prison or punish them in some way, but at some point their oppression is going to burst under it’s own weight…maybe.
No kidding. We’ve been so irresponsible. And it’s not merely letting the market decide, we were actively subsidizing fossil fuels instead of renewables so that renewables had difficulty being competitive. Now we’re decades behind where we should be.
You’re right that prices are way up, but there are also shortages. For example I haven’t been able to buy fresh green beans for the better part of a year.
I don’t follow farming much, is that actually happening today?
I think it’s a very hard problem to solve because it’s so closely tied to financial inequality, which is another issue that’s hard to solve because nobody (or relatively few) at the top want to give up their excesses so that those at the bottom can have more economically viable & comfortable lives.
I despise partisan politics and everything it stands for, but unfortunately when one side of the duopoly is so bent on corrupting democracy itself, practically every other issue becomes quaint and unimportant. Every vote must be “wasted” voting against authoritarianism rather than for something beneficial. It’s a lost opportunity to vote for actual policies and real improvements.
I don’t have much faith in democrats making things better, but then it’s not like independents have any legroom to maneuver. We really ducked a bullet this last election just to keep out a political party bent on overthrowing democratic elections. It sucks that the bar is set so low.
For all the glaring trouble with today’s republican party, the democrats’ own house is frankly also corrupt. “Super delegates” make sure that primary elections are not competitive and are designed to take away most of the public’s representation.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/23/opinions/superdelegates-democratic-party-kohn/index.html
We desperately need rank voting in federal elections so that we’re no longer beholden to this political duopoly. Alas, the odds are slim this will happen in our lifetimes because the duopoly parties, despite being enemies of the other, are both out for their own interests and not allowing alternative parties with better platforms to be more viable.
“..the price of more capable hardware is better.”
I think it’s quite easy to find second hand, ready to use mini pc-s under $100 that’s quite performant versus buying a new computer that usually north of $200. But yes, the newest is indeed easier to find. But from the price pov, second hand pc’s still better, provided one’s knowledgeable about hardware.
I have an HP t720 with 8 GB RAM and 16 GB of slow NAND flash memory running Devuan 3 with KDE. It is good enough for me to word processing and web browsing. I spent around 50 eur.
For my home lab/workshop I do something similar to this but with refurbished CAD workstations.
I’m not going to put the latest and greatest into my workshop / garage for running CAD or my 3D printer, etc,. etc., so I buy refurbished. It keeps my workshop PC about 5 years out of date, but given these are old corporate CAD workstations they have plenty of grunt, often i7 or Xeon with 32GB / 1TB SSD with a Nvidia or AMD graphics card of some sort, usually obtained for under $300. Then every couple of years I spend a few hundred on upgrading to a new recently decommissioned / refurbished workstation, I donate the old one to a local charity that gives decent PCs to kids in need of a home computer. I get a reasonable performance CAD Workstation for the workshop, that doesn’t bother me if it gets dusty, flooded, paint splattered or covered in cobwebs.
The current workstation can run the 3D printer, have a software scope operating and be displaying a 3D solid model all at the same time, no low cost new PC can do that. And I get the premium motherboards, top end firmware, etc., etc..
I inherited three or four genuine thin clients from an office clearout a while back. They were used as access front-ends to a web portal used by government agencies and ran a very cut-down and locked down version of Windows XP. Try as I might, I couldn’t do anything with the locked down bios, which didn’t allow any writing to the hard drives. I was about to throw them out and completely forgot about Coreboot. It probably won’t work with these but something else to tinker with before I call it a day with them.
@SDug I’m sure there is someone who can help you, whether it’s worth the expense is another issue.
Finding the right person would be the key, someone with a history of repairing / servicing that generation of hardware will have all the kit on hand to wipe the firmware. Often there is a physical barrier in place, like a cut pin or trace that needs to be bridged before access a serial comms somewhere on the board, or it may even need a specific chip to be installed / flashed / replaced.
On some medical kit it’s common to have a small serial interface chip that is clipped off after the firmware is flashed. The chip has built in keys, you have to replace it before you can do anything, I wouldn’t be surprised to find Ex. Gov or Mil thin clients do the very same.
Yes. I don’t think these are quite that locked down but flashing the bios chip might need a suitable flashing device and a bit of knowledge. I only wanted these as low powered DOS boxes as they are a bit long in the tooth for current Linux distros. Still, the way things are going, once the current chip shortage is over, even SBCs like the RPi might prove a cheaper and better bet for even what I intended for these TCs.