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Is a old raspberry pi viable for anything with Linux? (programming.dev)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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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[–] 20 points 10 months ago (5 children)

I have an entire home server running on my pi; it's just going to depend on what model you have and what you want to do with it. Personally, I run my pi from an SSD kept in a USB drive enclosure because microSD cards suck and I want my system to be responsive. I host websites and ssh into it all the time for a great number of random tasks. I have a custom Fedora install, but Raspberry Pi OS or whatever they switched the name to after Raspbian is probably fine for most people. It's based on Debian, or at least is was many years ago when I last saw anything about it.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Depending on the Pi, you are limited to USB 2 speeds for the external drive. That’s enough for many things, like streaming video, but doesn’t cut it for regular transfer of large files.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    I've got a Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB, and I've never had a problem with speed, really. The only issues I have with speed are when I do things from outside my home network, which is a limitation from my ISP, not my hardware.

    EDIT: Just checked with a quick dd and it seems my drive's sequential write speed is about 250MB/s, far exceeding USB 2.0. It's not a great SSD, so that's a pretty expected value, tbh.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Pretty sure it's rasp2b but maybe a rasp3... Its in a case so I have to open it and look at the markings

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    Someone more knowledgeable about the older gen Pis could probably help you a lot more than I could. I have a Pi 4b 8GB for my server, so that's gonna be a bit more capable than what you've got, but I imagine you can probably still find lots to do with it! Setting up a basic headless server should be no problem at all.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    The biggest limitation on the older models is RAM. There's other issues with network contention (the Ethernet is actually a USB device on the board), raw CPU (especially gen 1 boards), but really it's all about the RAM.

    I use these kinds of boards for more hardware/embedded kinds of situations. No GUI Linux machines will easily run in 200-400MB of RAM before you start spinning up additional services or tools.

    If you're really RAM blocked you can use a more stripped down Linux install or even hop to BSD and run real lean on resources for the OS. All of these options can still run most network services or simple build/dev kinds of support systems. They could be message queue servers, run GPIO-driven hardware systems, be sensor platforms, run DNS/DHCP/PiHole kinds of systems, be a speaker driver endpoint for a larger system, bong a clock sound every hour, or whatever. That's just what I could come up with while typing on the fly. If you start adding hardware to the IO ports it just goes nuts what even the older boards are capable of.

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