[jay.scot]
[011]


--[ Reducing my footprint, using a mini-pc


I recently turned off my main pc, a homegrown setup I had been upgrading
over the years. It had quite a decent spec, AMD RX XT5700, Intel i7,
32Gb RAM, 3xSSDs and a NVM drives. I have mentioned in previous TXT
files I mainly use the command line apart from qutebrowser occasionally
so it was complete overkill. Not to mention the energy prices in north
Scotland being absurd, it was time to "downgrade".


I had a few options in mind, a good old Raspberry Pi, a 2nd hand
Thinkcentre or an off the shelf mini-pc. As you obviously gathered,
I went with the mini-pc, a beelink U59 [0]. The RPI are actually quite
costly now, hard to get. I also wanted an x86 architecture for using
Alpine Linux - my desktop distro of choice these days. Apparently the
Thinkcentre can be quite loud too, so I ended up buying the U59 with the
500Gb SSD, 16Gb Ram options for around £200 on Amazon.


I installed Alpine Linux with no issues at all. I have a bootstrap
script for Alpine [1], so using this I was up and running with the foot
terminal open on sway 15 minutes later. The U59 is completely quiet, and
the max I have seen the temp get so far was 59C while playing Loom via
ScummVM. I had to compile ScummVM from source which took around 20
mintues, not bad at all. The power draw was sitting around 15 watts
during this time.


Really happy with it so far, will be interesting to see how long this
machine lasts for.


0. https://www.bee-link.com/catalog/product/index?id=334
1. gopher://jay.scot/1/git/alpine-bootstrap/

.EOF