The Raspberry Pi seems nice hardware for a small home server like the FreedomBox. It is both low power and low cost. The only questions for me were: is it powerful enough – how does it compare to other computers? On the Raspberry Pi website I read that it’s performance is roughly equal to a …
Category Archive: hardware
Hardware
Sep 07
Introducing the MK802 FreedomStick.
Recently a whole range of cheap Android devices have become available, all powered by the Allwinner A10 SOC. Thanks to the way A10 devices boot they are very easy to hack. All that is needed is a bootable SD card. How to make such a card is no big secret, and there are now multiple …
Mar 31
Cheap hardware for the FreedomBox software.
In this article i answer the following question: When does the energy cost of running the FreedomBox software on a desktop computer justify buying specialized low power hardware? The answer to this question may surprise you. Not long ago a reader of my blog asked me why he could not use his desktop computer to …
Mar 27
Building an energy efficient server
Last week I finally built my first custom PC. It’s very energy efficient, quiet and it can be used as a 24/7 server or as a general purpose PC. The specs are: Processor : Intel G620 Dual core Pentium processor Mainboard : Intel Desktop Board DZ68DB Memory : 2 * 4GB PC3-10600 (DDR3-1333) (No Name) …
Apr 24
Installing Debian GNU/Linux on my FreedomBox
One of the best things I did with my QNAP TS-119 NAS was installing Debian onto it. The software on my QNAP was excellent for a NAS, but I knew the hardware could be more than just a NAS. I wanted the box to be a full GNU/Linux server. Fortunately Debian fully supports the QNAP …
Apr 15
Free hardware for the FreedomBox software
Every time you read an article about the FreedomBox it mentions that the hardware is very cheap and will become even cheaper in the future. This emphasis on cheap hardware worries me. After all, the FreedomBox is a server that must run reliably 24/7 for years. Cheap and server are incompatible. If you ask the …