Author Topic: List of 40 inexpensive single-board Linux friendly computers (Read 25091 times)

40hz · « **on:** January 02, 2015, 07:44 AM »

Courtesy of the good folks over at LinuxGizmos:

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs
Dec 31, 2014 | Eric Brown

2014 brought us plenty of new open-spec, community-backed SBCs — from $35 bargains, to octa-core powerhouses — and all with Linux or Android support.

In May of this year, LinuxGizmos and Linux.com collaborated on a joint survey, asking our readers to choose their favorite open-spec hacker SBCs from a list of 32 that run Linux and/or Android. Our SBC survey winners, ranked one to five, included the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, Odroid-XU, CubieTruck, and Banana Pi single board computers. Thanks to the flood of new open-spec, community-backed boards, as well as the demise of others, we have updated our list for this end-of-year snapshot.

We’re skipping the survey — and the prizes — this time around, but we hope to offer a similar, but updated list and survey in May or June 2015. With even better prizes.

We removed more than a dozen boards from the list that were no longer in stock, were not being actively supported, were just plain old, or scored too poorly in our last survey to merit inclusion. Some of these, such as the Odroid-XU, were fairly new boards but have already been replaced by newer models (Odroid-XU3). We also added about two-dozen new SBCs, thereby ending up with a total of 40 boards. <more>

Read the rest here.

Happy hardware hacking!

Ath · « **Reply #1 on:** January 02, 2015, 08:59 AM »

Ah, after reading all that I still can't decide what next board (after the RPi B+ I bought 2 months ago) I'd get for playing

rgdot · « **Reply #2 on:** January 02, 2015, 11:48 AM »

USB Armory seems intriguing, what's everybody's opinion about it?

Renegade · « **Reply #3 on:** January 02, 2015, 07:27 PM »

Wow. Quite the write up there!

One of the considerations I use when trying to pick some tech solution/product, is whether or not it will be there in 5 years (or however long) when I need a replacement, or whether there will be some sort of compatible product available -- i.e. Will I need to throw out past efforts and start from scratch? It's never any kind of an exact process, and predicting the future is, well... like playing the lottery.

So... I do sometimes wish that reviews included a quick commentary on the manufacturer and about their track record.

Ath · « **Reply #4 on:** January 03, 2015, 04:21 AM »

USB Armory seems intriguing, what's everybody's opinion about it?
-rgdot (January 02, 2015, 11:48 AM)

Well, for me it's too small, too application-specific and too expensive compared to many of the other contenders.
I'd go for an RPi-compatible board with more horse-power, as the RPi is 'rather sluggish', to say it nicely

40hz · « **Reply #5 on:** January 03, 2015, 07:26 PM »

Will I need to throw out past efforts and start from scratch? It's never any kind of an exact process, and predicting the future is, well... like playing the lottery.
-Renegade (January 02, 2015, 07:27 PM)

Considering these little boxes run Linux and/or Android, I don't think that should be a major concern. Unless you think those operating systems will soon go away.

The people producing these little boards aren't into creating lock-in or proprietary platforms. They get the benefits of an "open" philosophy with something as generic as an SBC. They need to make their products as broadly supported and compatible with existing codebases and drivers as possible. Something that makes sense when you want to sell millions of these things. It's a volume game to provide the most capability, and the broadest level of support, at the lowest possible cost to the consumer. Think RaspberryPi. Think Arduino.

rgdot · « **Reply #6 on:** January 03, 2015, 08:34 PM »

USB Armory seems intriguing, what's everybody's opinion about it?
-rgdot (January 02, 2015, 11:48 AM)
Well, for me it's too small, too application-specific and too expensive compared to many of the other contenders.
I'd go for an RPi-compatible board with more horse-power, as the RPi is 'rather sluggish', to say it nicely
-Ath (January 03, 2015, 04:21 AM)

Thanks

Deozaan · « **Reply #7 on:** January 08, 2015, 04:04 PM »

I think I'm going to get an Odroid-C1. Same price as RPi, and even has a 40 pin GPIO panel that is (mostly) compatible with RPi. But outperforms the RPi by about 4-6 times.

ewemoa · « **Reply #8 on:** March 21, 2015, 06:30 PM »

So did you get one?

Deozaan · « **Reply #9 on:** March 21, 2015, 09:42 PM »

I did get one. Though now with the Rpi2 which has similar specifications, it's much harder to choose between the two.

ewemoa · « **Reply #10 on:** March 21, 2015, 11:17 PM »

The consequences of continued technical development?

Deozaan · « **Reply #11 on:** March 22, 2015, 01:15 PM »

Yeah. I think the C1 still has slightly better specifications than the RPi2, but the RPi is a lot more widely adopted/supported, which means that you're more likely to find ARMv7 software that works with the RPi as opposed to having to figure out how to configure and compile things from source yourself for the C1.

f0dder · « **Reply #12 on:** March 22, 2015, 01:49 PM »

Speaking of the RPi2, I ended up buying one last months, because a bunch of my co-workers made a group purchase.

Not sure what to stick on it yet, though - as far as I can tell, Raspian is still built for arm6, and Ubuntu Core is in a veeeery pre-prerelease state (snappy seems like a nice idea, but there's only a handful of packages for it - the system doesn't even have a compiler or vim yet).

So, are there any decent arm7 RasPi2-friendly Linux distros out there?

ewemoa · « **Reply #13 on:** March 22, 2015, 06:06 PM »

If I had a RPi2 (he he), I might consider the following:

http://archlinuxarm....adcom/raspberry-pi-2

Deozaan · « **Reply #14 on:** March 22, 2015, 09:33 PM »

One nice thing about the C1 over the RPi/2 is the gigabit ethernet. I was planning to use my C1 as a Plex media server or other Owncloud/NAS type device, and I thought having a fast connection to the network would be really useful for that.

But so far I haven't gotten Plex or Owncloud to work on the C1 how I want them to. Plex refuses to transcode videos because the image I used to install was built for a TV box system with poor CPU capabilities. IMO the C1 can handle transcoding perfectly fine. I converted a 90+ minute mkv to mp4 format in about 2 minutes just to test. I'm sure the C1 could transcode and stream without a problem at that rate. And for Owncloud, I was following a tutorial that had me customize things a bit (by using nginx instead of apache) and somewhere along the way things didn't work as the tutorial said they should.

So for now I've just got a $35 Mumble server.

But I keep playing with it.

f0dder · « **Reply #15 on:** March 27, 2015, 11:38 AM »

If I had a RPi2 (he he), I might consider the following:
http://archlinuxarm....adcom/raspberry-pi-2
-ewemoa (March 22, 2015, 06:06 PM)

Oh, Arch is still around, and there's a native arm7 version? That might actually be the perfect distro for the (relatively) limited hardware, especially if it hasn't bloated up since back when I used it.

f0dder · « **Reply #16 on:** March 27, 2015, 11:46 AM »

One nice thing about the C1 over the RPi/2 is the gigabit ethernet. I was planning to use my C1 as a Plex media server or other Owncloud/NAS type device, and I thought having a fast connection to the network would be really useful for that.
-Deozaan (March 22, 2015, 09:33 PM)

Can you hook storage to it in a way that's fast enough that gigabit matters?

Personally I'd like two see two NICs (100mbit would be fine), that would make for a very nice and capable router/firewall

Deozaan · « **Reply #17 on:** March 27, 2015, 12:16 PM »

One nice thing about the C1 over the RPi/2 is the gigabit ethernet. I was planning to use my C1 as a Plex media server or other Owncloud/NAS type device, and I thought having a fast connection to the network would be really useful for that.
-Deozaan (March 22, 2015, 09:33 PM)
Can you hook storage to it in a way that's fast enough that gigabit matters?
-f0dder (March 27, 2015, 11:46 AM)

It has the following storage possibilities: USB 2.x, MicroSD UHS-I, and eMMC.

4wd · « **Reply #18 on:** March 27, 2015, 08:33 PM »

Personally I'd like two see two NICs (100mbit would be fine), that would make for a very nice and capable router/firewall
-f0dder (March 27, 2015, 11:46 AM)

USB NIC would give you the second NIC and is fast enough in most cases I would think.

f0dder · « **Reply #19 on:** March 31, 2015, 01:07 PM »

Thanks for the recommendation, ewemoa - arch seems like a pretty good fit for the raspi2. Installation was slightly annoying, though, since there's no images available. I pondered whether I should accept running the root filesystem as vfat (since that's what I could create from my work macbook) - but ended up transferring a Ubuntu ISO to an usb pendrive, boot my old laptop from that, and get an ext4 root fs.

4wd: that would probably work, but it would be clumsy, and I've found USB to generally be somewhat fidgety when it comes to network stuff :/ - would be cool if one could exchange a block of USB ports for a NIC.

4wd · « **Reply #20 on:** March 31, 2015, 06:41 PM »

ArkOS have stated they'll update their distro to use the RasPi2 when they get their hands on it.

Currently supports:

Beaglebone Black
Cubieboard2
Cubietruck
ODROID U-Series
Raspberry Pi

ewemoa · « **Reply #21 on:** April 02, 2015, 03:29 AM »

Installation was slightly annoying, though, since there's no images available. I pondered whether I should accept running the root filesystem as vfat (since that's what I could create from my work macbook) - but ended up transferring a Ubuntu ISO to an usb pendrive, boot my old laptop from that, and get an ext4 root fs.
-f0dder (March 31, 2015, 01:07 PM)

Thanks for reporting back on your success

Perhaps your work-around for getting an ext4 root fs is less trouble than trying to achieve the same end with something like VirtualBox (possibly with its extension pack).

ewemoa · « **Reply #22 on:** April 02, 2015, 03:30 AM »

ArkOS have stated they'll update their distro to use the RasPi2 when they get their hands on it.
-4wd (March 31, 2015, 06:41 PM)

Hadn't heard of that -- looks pretty interesting! Thanks for sharing.

f0dder · « **Reply #23 on:** April 02, 2015, 03:47 AM »

Perhaps your work-around for getting an ext4 root fs is less trouble than trying to achieve the same end with something like VirtualBox (possibly with its extension pack).
-ewemoa (April 02, 2015, 03:29 AM)

Well, VirtualBox probably supports raw device access (vmware certainly does), but that would still have required a Linux install - might as well see how current-gen Ubuntu runs on my old laptop

(runs pretty decently, but still can't resume from standby... *sigh*)

ewemoa · « **Reply #24 on:** April 02, 2015, 05:36 AM »

Although raw device access seems like it might work, I was thinking one might boot some live iso image in VirtualBox (or equivalent), create an ext4 fs image via the booted virtual environment, copy/share the resulting image to the host OS and use the likes of dd [1] to write the result to an SD card.

Booting up another machine might be simpler and quicker ofc -- but if one really didn't want to reboot...

[1] IIRC, there are various implementations of dd for Mac OS X, Windows, etc. But I take it you're quite aware of that sort of thing.