With everyone buying tablets lately, the low end of computers is getting pretty low-cost indeed. Creating single-purpose computers is possible, and I was thinking of doing that to create a Go-testing system. (Though probably not necessary for me.) It got me to thinking, though…
How low-cost a system could run DragonFly? The master-slave and low system requirements of Hammer lead to some interesting possibilities. There’s no Arduino equivalent for DragonFly because there’s no DragonFly on ARM, despite all my wishing. DragonFly has been run on Soekris systems before, and might work on a PCEngines ALIX board. Ebay, my basement, or Craigslist are options too, but not as fun. Who has suggestions?
What about the Intel Galileo board? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GGM6KJQ/ref=amb_link_391457722_3?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=auto-sparkle&pf_rd_r=0YETJYR48ZGF8VHYN4E5&pf_rd_t=301&pf_rd_p=1665886302&pf_rd_i=intel%20galileo
I’m a novice in *.nixes but have always been intrigued with Dragonfly. So I’m interested in this question as well as learning more about installing, using Dragonfly. Thanks.
The Galileo board is interesting. The additional hardware I/O isn’t needed in this use case, so there may be a cheaper option… though it’s hard to beat that price.
Thinking about it, older thinkpads would be a good option. Laptops tend to have slightly funky hardware, but the thinkpad series was better than most in being compatible.
The Lenovo Outlet is cheaper than full price, but still in the hundreds-of-dollars range. There was a place in the midwest U.S that sold corporate laptop castoffs that had really good deals (Retrobox), but they seem to have ceased to exist. This may be a craigslist/ebay answer.
HP ProLiant MicroServer G7 N54L is quite cheap (180 EUR), while of very high build-quality. It’s a very good NAS platform btw.
I’ve been running DragonFly on a Zotac Zbox (don’t know which model, but it’s a dual-core 64bit-capable Atom CPU). Just works…