Guess what, you’re right! Technically, it does boot but

Debian GNU/Linux 13 mmpc tty1

mmpc login: _

does not bring joy.

Also, why is the fan spinning? I’ve been on this screen for minutes while looking up lightdm troubleeshooting on my phone. Blinking the cursor and Linux backend stuff can’t be too CPU-intensive, right?

Edit: fixed. I had broken lightdm by adding the numlockx on script in the wrong place, too eager to get a lock screen with an enabled Num Lock

Mmm… Let’s reboot and see how fast the new SSD made things! It can’t be worse than 60 seconds with Mint (or 300 seconds with Windows) on the HDD!

*chuckles* I’m in danger!

Debian GNU/Linux 13 mmpc tty1

mmpc login: _

Edit: fixed. I had broken lightdm by adding the numlockx on script in the wrong place, too eager to get a lock screen with an enabled Num Lock

And the boot time is 20 seconds, on par with Windows somehow.‌

I haven’t restarted it since but it has brought joy. It’s not pretty but way less setup hassle than Windows if you want it at least somewhat privacy-respecting. And even default XFCE beats Windows 11 on looks and practicality.

I have worked with VMs before and still use an XP one sometimes. But modern Windows in a VM on an old laptop with 4 GB of RAM? I’ll pass…

I mean, the good old dumb 32" LCD TV should be the primary screen. But maybe mom will want to watch in another room sometimes, in which case she can pull out the laptop and use her familiar IPTV client.

No, I’m absolutely not. What desktop environment should I choose? KDE Plasma is tempting - it would be nice to use it before I install it with Arch on my main system - but I don’t need the cutting edge or much personalization. I know XFCE best but GNOME is default… GNOME’s big launcher looks great for the TV but it’s also more resource-hungry and less customizable…

I guess I’ll go with the familiar Windows-style XFCE and maybe add big remote-friendly icons later when I configure an IR receiver.

Raspberry Pi is expensive and does not come with a UPS. I already have this mediocre laptop. The Pi cost may recoup itself on the electricity bill but I’m not happy about booting from an SD card.

The only lid problem is that the BIOS of this laptop does not allow turning on with the lid closed (also, there is no Power-on-AC) but I might hack it with a magnet.

Experience? Yes, but I’m also really clumsy and impatient. Lots of things, hardware and software, broke in my hands because I wasn’t careful enough. At least there is no personal data on the system right now that I could erase.

Je to jenom jedna stránka z dokumentu o promoakci, kdoví, kdo to dělal. Ale podle nízkého rozlišení se jedná o masový deployment a ne hlavní pracovní počítač někoho moc nahoře: ten by asi taky dokázal sešít PDFka.

Congratulations, you are very funny. /s

I was actually considering something like “A new Raspberry Pi 5 is the best and most cost-effective option for my use case” to take advantage of Cunningham’s law.

• The drive can be spun down, and I’ll try to cache most frequent and recent files to SSD to save power
• Volts aren’t watts, the HDD uses 20W when spinning but <1 W in standby
• The home already overproduces solar so yes, we have cheap electricity at daytime, but we still have to pay some 0.40 €/kWh for the nightly use. Solar panels are a good investment but so is saving power regardless of production, otherwise one is robbing oneself of the grid buyback payouts. These are around half the cost of nighttime electricity.

Why Docker? I’m definitely not after scalability.

I don’t think the TV does either

Edit: it does! I tested with the existing satellite STB (which I’ll be replacing with IPTV for cost reasons) but the only feature it can do is turn the source on/off, it does not pass the 0-9 or P+/P- key presses to it when in HDMI mode - it switches to the now useless analog tuner when any of them are pressed. Either way, I have a universal remote that I can program to send different codes for 0-9 and P+/P-, so that they are only interpreted by the USB IR receiver I install and not the TV.

Most MoBos allow programmatic fan control too, right?

I’m OK with a fan running when the HDD is spinning. To save power, a SSD can perhaps be used as a cache to minimize HDD usage time during file transfers over LAN or torrent.

Fujitsu Futro S740

Now that’s a good recommendation. I didn’t find any for sale around here but I can get an HP T530 that also idles below 10 W for 35 €. I’d need to buy an HDMI-DP adapter, plus an M.2 SSD or a wireless module (they use the same slot and there’s just one), the other would need to be a USB peripheral.

All the use cases I need are well-documented on ARM by the RPi community. What issues do you think I’d encounter?

plenty of useful IO

It’s not that old or professional, unfortunately. It was a budget 15.6" one I got from a relative. Only two USB ports (one is 3.0), Ethernet, HDMI, headphone jack and DVD±RW drive. It’s underwhelming but not that I need much more. It can’t even do 4K but the TV is 1366x768 so that’s OK too.

The device will run 100% of the time as a torrent client and NAS so I don’t really need to solve the power-on issue, long unplanned outages are rare and I can probably bridge the short ones by going low power and waking up every hour.

I already have two USB adapters for SATA, they just require Molex connectors so I need an entire ATX PSU right now to power the drive. They will be enough to get the setup going before I measure how much power I actually need and solder an appropriate 12V and 5V supply to the cable.

I have an old laptop that is used as an HTPC but not much anymore. It runs Lubuntu alright but it needs an upgrade to an SSD. I think I’ll shell out a little extra for 512 GB rather than some 64-128 GB the Linux+software install needs, so I can cache media there and reduce the HDD utilization. A hack will be required to bypass the lack of “power on AC” in the BIOS, probably removing the lid magnets and wiring the power switch to an Arduino or something to facilitate a restart after a power outage (long unplanned outages are rare though so I might get away without that right now). The idle power usage will be some 10 W but I can live with that.

I wonder if there is an advanced BitTorrent client that can import my extensive qBittorrent library and respond to supply/demand while minimizing the HDD’s duty cycle… for example refusing to spin it up just to seed public or overseeded torrents, and only spinning it up to copy the contents to SSD for files that are on demand, or write completed downloads from SSD to HDD.