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Is an old raspberry pi useful for anything based on Linux? (programming.dev)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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I don't expect much but I found an old pi I bought probably 2016(may of been 2017). It was supposed to be a pi-hole but was never able to get the dns forwarding to work on my modem. It still works but wanted to somehow convert it to a regular distro(it's based on a micro-SD and I don't have any more microsd readers). I wanted to set it up as a basic system I could ssh into a terminal. Not expecting anything fancy or even graphic based. A lot of stuff I want to learn/practice "work" on windows but are native to Linux, like vim/neovim nmap gcc etc. Is this feasible? Am I under estimating what's possible with it?

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[–] 14 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Definately underestimating it, an old RPI can easily run a full on desktop OS, maybe not like a bleeding edge KDE with all the visuals turned on, but XFCE LXDE, etc... would run fine, libre office and basic IDEs...

but yeah absolutely zero reason to think you'd have even a wink of trouble running terminal based stuff.

I mean if it's already imaged at some level with raspbian or something, technically it's most likely already set up to do the concepts you are looking at without needing to set up a new distro.

So to add anything up to date you would probably need to get a micro sd reader... here in the US you can pick one up for like 5-$10 at walmart, so we aren't talking a huge investment.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Would I be able to run a gui remotely from a Windows pc? I have extra monitors(yes kinda a tech hoarder) but don't have space to setup another full setup. It has raspbian installed(or the pi-hole version they used to have), will have to guess on the password but I think I remember it.

    My initial plan was to remotely access it via ssh with putty on the windows system.

    Long story, my shield decided to have its network die. I reset it. I replaced the network cable and changed ethernet ports on router but nothing would work (wasn't even getting the lights on the ports). I didn't know if it was the shield or the router so I found the pi and plugged it in. Network immediately worked so I know it's the shield. I was able to find an old Asus nexus Google TV box which "solved" the shield and was thinking of using the pi for something other than just sitting in a box under a bunch of wires.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    X2goserver certainly is an option there. not too complicated to set up, or VNC is another option. As always there will be a bit of screen lag when sharing a gui over network.

    and yeah as someone else pointed out there is also the option to run x applications from an ssh client if you enable it. now I will admit I don't think there's a huge amount of utility, more pointing out though it's most likely you are either drastically underestimating the power of a raspberry pi, or maybe overestimating the resource overhead of linux distributions.

    The linux world doesn't quite have the mysterious resource usage creep at nearly the same scale as windows a slim but still with gui setup can still run in under 100 mb of ram.

    Leaning on the extreme low end assuming you were a generation behind... the raspberry pi 2b+ came out in 2015 with 1 gb of ram. So yeah, while I can't really name any gui applications that might be desirable to use in that way. IE it could be a decent web browser station, or kodi media player if hooked up to a TV etc... I would imagine lag from using a gui application accross would easilly remove any advantage that you'd get over... well just running the probably existing version for the windows PC that you are likely remoting in from.

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