things are going just great for raspberry pi:

[kyle_pegasus@scalie.club]

@zzt @arichtman @jpm @neoluddite I just fell into the raspberry pi trap because it's the only platform where VLC's setting to display video on a specific monitor actually works.

in exchange for that feature, it starts "playing" the video before loading it, so the first two seconds are cut off.

£46 well spent!

[icil@app.wafrn.net]

Man, rpi fell off. Minecraft pocket edition with scratch programming was cool when I was in primary

[dan@axillae.telent.net]

@zzt ha, same experience with nixos rpi-installer. And it doesn't refuse to write the image, or tell you the provisioning didn't work, so you sit there like a lemon for ten minutes staring at a headless SBC with a flickering led thinking "I wonder how long first boot is supposed to take surely I can ping it by now".

I ended up installing my RPI zero w using an HDMI video capture usb dongle and vlc running on my laptop

[jwz@mastodon.social]

@zzt Did you try a rubber band? Alternately maybe you should re-mill whatever it is out of a cube of titanium?

[zzt@mas.to]

shit actually I’m gonna follow up on this since “it works now byeeeee” is one of my least favorite types of posters

for the waveshare 2.8 inch DSI display, just follow the directions on the vendor’s wiki to pull in the proprietary dtoverlay: https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/2.8inch_DSI_LCD. this won’t work at all for non-rpi SBCs unfortunately (it’s not a normal display by any means) and you’ll have work to do to get it working on other than raspberry pi OS. other than that it’ll just fire up on reboot as an fbcon

[zzt@mas.to]

don’t use that LCD-show shit, it’ll fuck up your config in various ways and isn’t compatible with Debian Trixie images (the vendor dtoverlay is). you don’t need to run any weird shit to get the display working with DRM or xorg other than rotating it normally as you would any other fbcon or xrandr display, if you want it in landscape

the waveshare 2.8 inch HDMI display is a fucking timing disaster that the orange pi 3b’s HDMI PHY can’t drive but my laptop can, so it’s not a great DSI alternative

[zzt@mas.to]

@jwz I’m fucking amazed I haven’t gotten “why didn’t you simply write open source drivers for the LCD” yet

(this project has already turned into future patches for qemu, somehow. it’s a nightstand computer inside one of those clocks shaped like a Mac 128k)

[resuna@ohai.social]

@zzt

So are the RiscV SBCs any better?

[brendanjones@fosstodon.org]

@jpm @neoluddite @zzt I’ve recently been returning to the idea of finally setting up a pi hole with a Raspberry Pi, but this thread gives me pause. Would it be better to do it on an Orange Pi than a Raspberry Pi?

[zzt@mas.to]

@Brendanjones @jpm @neoluddite I highly recommend used x86 hardware for non-embedded computing tasks (essentially anything where you don’t need GPIOs, a specific form factor, or passive cooling).

my home file server is a Dell Optiplex 9020M USFF that I got from an enterprise surplus sale for $20. it’s currently running about 10 fairly heavy daemons and a ZFS NAS with the 8GB RAM it came with. they’re a bit more expensive now — eBay says $40, but it’ll be cheaper if it’s available locally

1/

[zzt@mas.to]

@Brendanjones @jpm @neoluddite in spite of its name, it looks like pi-hole will work fine on x86 hardware: https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/prerequisites/ from my experience, it’ll run much better on x86 than it will on the pi. it seems like Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora are officially supported.

if you go for one of the Dells I mentioned, take note of its ports and available upgrades (this is enterprise hardware so Dell’s docs are still available). if you need above gigabit Ethernet, you may need a USB adapter.

[zzt@mas.to]

@resuna someone with more experience with the SBCs than me might have to answer that — I like the instruction set and have tinkered with it some on FPGAs, but most of my RISC-V SBC experience is with the Ox64, which I can’t recommend because they’re awful janky things that I’m not convinced anyone has used successfully in a project, but that’s more a Pine64 problem than a RISC-V one.

I’d be happy to hear if there’s a good vendor doing open RISC-V hardware.

[vxo@digipres.club]

@zzt @Brendanjones @jpm @neoluddite Those Optiplex USFF machines are no joke. I have a couple running various tasks now and they haven't skipped a beat. The cooling system is remarkably quiet and effective for what it is.

Dare I say the Intel igpu on these is perfectly fine and dandy too

[zzt@mas.to]

@vxo @Brendanjones @jpm @neoluddite exactly! I actually have a whole ryzen+ARC desktop I built from used parts (a nightmare build for various reasons) to replace the 9020M in case I run out of resources on the machine, but it’s still chugging along reliably enough that taking it down and swapping the deployment over hasn’t made my todo list yet

the desktop’s also gonna be louder than the USFF even though it’s a box full of noctua and I’m not looking forward to that

[trkzn@mastodon.social]

@zzt @Brendanjones @jpm @neoluddite I've been on the market for a surplus USFF PC for a while now but all I see is 5 to 10 times that price on eBay (in Europe). If I had found one for 20$ I would have bought it in a heartbeat

[samuel@social.whatshouldyoueat.com]

@trkzn don't know what country you're in but this kind of refurbished hardware reseller is maybe what you're looking for https://www.remarkt.nl/desktops (I'm not connected to this in any way fwiw).

[idropyou@mastodon.social]

@zzt @Brendanjones @jpm @neoluddite I've had great luck running a pihole on old laptops that have wired ethernet. So, totally agree on small power efficient x86 systems.

All our normal laptops run Linux, so they just have a local pihole install as well. Nice for travel.

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@samuel @trkzn ex-corporate desktops are super cheap - 4GB RAM is unusable for desktop work in 2026 but it's awesome for a box that sits there doing stuff. i hit ebay for these things

[crzwdjk@mastodon.social]

@zzt On a technical and slightly pedantic point it's not the "GPU" as such that's in control, it's an embedded ARM (Cortex-M I think) secondary processor that controls the boot process. Which is not that unusual for SoCs really, the unusual thing about the Raspberry Pi is that it runs an opaque blob all the way until loading the Linux kernel and that that opaque blob keeps running even after the kernel boots, Linux AFAIK has no driver that uses the secondary processor.

[trkzn@mastodon.social]

@davidgerard @samuel Yeah I've been watching eBay for a while, but as I'm looking for 8 gigs machine with a mid range CPU prices tend to go higher and higher these days.