Edit: So one is definitely going to be the Proselytizer Library Stick (OK I need a better name for it, fine). Going to test out some Debian options on there, just need to find a nice way to make it a user friendly portable library/reader, so feel free to mention whatever comes to mind there as well.
But I have more of these little suckers, so thats just one for now.
So I’ve got a few Intel compute sticks sitting on my desk here, and I don’t know what I want to do with them (aside from throw them out, I’d rather find some value in them if I can).
They are STK1AW32SC, which have the atom x5-Z8330 chips, with a whopping 2gb ram, 32gb emmc, and a microsd slot.
A few things I’ve considered:
- Take a few LCDs and the drivers and make a “household front end”, basically just point to my locally hosted services (mealie for recipes, hass, etc)
- Same thing but make it a digital picture frame
- Compute to point to a magic mirror instance
- Try out how terrible emulation is on them to make a little game console for the kids thats standalone? They already can use the living room one for that, which is a usff box with a lot more power. So probably not.
- Automatically boots to rick roll to stick in TVs at my BILs house and drive him nuts?
Open to ideas! I’ve got tons of machines here, so I really don’t need them to do anything - which means the silly and borderline stupid (see rick roll note above) are perfectly acceptable ideas.
The x5-Z8330 has 800 passmark points which is enough to run Arch with XFce without issues. 2 GB of RAM though is the sticky point. It is problematic with Debian/Mint as they consume about 800 MBs of RAM on a cold boot (don’t even think of Fedora or Ubuntu that are dogs when it comes to RAM usage), but on Arch you can configure it to consume only 450 MB of RAM: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/660/702/810/921/104/original/3313b7ec1d3cdae4.png (here’s my Arch/XFce with a BeOS theme using 585 MB of RAM with 3 apps open). That’s a life saver on a 2 GB of RAM computer, because Youtube alone on Chrome can use up to 800 MB of RAM, while on Firefox goes up to 1.1 GB. Consider that 128 MB of RAM also goes to the integrated graphics card. But with other websites, or with a third party youtube front-end, or other apps, 2 GB can be enough (just make sure you give it a 4 GB swap file – not zswap). Finally, make sure you use only a background color, not an image. Images, uncompressed in RAM, can use up to 80 MB of RAM if they are in high-res. A plain color takes kilobytes! Also, disable the BT service and any other service you don’t use via XFce’s startup utility. That one takes 45 MB alone, it’s a dog… Load it only when you need it.
Running a 32 bit os might net you better idle. I run 32 bit debian on an ancient laptop and my idle is a bit lower, 300-400 mb. I’m also using openbox.