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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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