Proxmox is available free. You pay for support and maybe other things with a license, but you can download it and give it a spin at no cost. I just switched to Proxmox around 1m ago when I restarted my homelab project after years on hiatus. I used to use Esxi before Broadcom bought VMware and decided to suck. I like it so far.

It might be overkill for your needs. I’m running it because I want to play with setting up and managing Win Server (I only have experience managing existing servers on Win), so there’s a distinct reason for me to be on Proxmox even though I’m a Mac and Linux person. I agree that it might be overkill for your i5 if you only plan to run one Ubuntu instance on it. However, a lot of homelabbing is about having an environment to try out and learn new skills. If that’s something that’s interesting to you, it might be worthwhile.

Keep in mind that you could also run KVM for virtualization if you find reason for VMs. You’re not limited to Proxmox. And if you see no need for VMs, you already have three devices to do the things you bought them to do.

Try following some of the advice in this thread. Hardware tests if the BIOS supports it. Maybe try underclocking or undervolting the CPU is BIOS supports that. If you can pull a RAM chip and test with just one, then test the chips individually in each slot, that’d be something worth trying. I’m shooting from the hip, but these are things that could help isolate a possible hardware issue.

You might also be able to replace the firmware with something like DD-WRT or OpenWRT or Tomato or other third-party firmware.

By resigning, there’s nothing on his record to prevent getting a job in another department. Hooray! The system works. /s

Apple’s guy in charge of those systems called “hallucinations” exactly that last night in an on-stage interview with John Gruber.

I ordered a BananaPi board years ago but then life took me places where I didn’t have time or energy to follow up. I’ve recently rejoined the hobbyist homelab market, so I’ve quite interested. I’d read that drivers could be an issue with non-Pi boards but haven’t ever found out. Which boards / companies are recommendation-worthy at the moment?

Asking twice because two people had similar replies and I’m looking for feedback, not because I want to spam the thread.

I ordered a BananaPi board years ago but then life took me places where I didn’t have time or energy to follow up. I’ve recently rejoined the hobbyist homelab market, so I’ve quite interested. I’d read that drivers could be an issue with non-Pi boards but haven’t ever found out. Which boards / companies are recommendation-worthy at the moment?

Asking twice because two people had similar replies and I’m looking for feedback, not because I want to spam the thread.

I hope this isn’t the prelude to a decline. I just ordered my third Pi over the weekend. It should arrive today. I’d hate to see the platform squandered by “make number go up” types.

We’re at the end-times for western capitalism, where rent-seeking has become the primary driver of markets. It’s happening all around us.

I thought we were well past this topic. I guess everything old is new again. In fact, I’ll dust off a classic:

“Bugs fly through open Windows.”

And that’s how I decided to install Debian as my next Linux VM (just got back into VMs in the past week with Proxmox). We’ll see how it does replacing my former favorite, CentOS, now that IBM / Red Shat have borked things up on that end.

Alyssa Rosenzweig is a badass low-lever coder. I believe she’s been responsible for a huge amount of the video driver work for Asahi. What an ass-kicker.

I think those reporting success running Linux on old hw should state the distro and window manager that they’re using if they want to provide useful feedback. I’m not in that group, but Tiny Linux comes to mind. Possibly Alpine? Probably better info to be had from daily-drivers.

It is and it isn’t. Apple isn’t the best at managing development resources, so they seem to get stretched kinda thin when they take on too many projects. I know they have all the money in the world. That doesn’t make them effective at managing many teams on many projects. They’re already falling on their face on some of their software goals, at least from the outside. I’m happy enough for third-party devs to fill in niche features so long as Apple doesn’t block them from doing so.

I’m not shy of command line config, so that’s good to know. I copied both Ice and the other recommendation from SixColors to my RIL apps. I’ll check them out when I start seeing reasons to move off of my present install of Bartender. Until then, it still does everything I want in ways that I like. Thanks for the heads up!

Yes, you should look for hand-holding tutorials. I don’t mean that to slight you. The first time I installed Linux was way before the internet was fast or full of easy to access info and way before most had access to a secondary device (like a phone) when hitting a roadblock.

It booted to a text prompt. I had no idea how to login (probably root / root or root / password or root / [blank], but htf would I know that?) so I erased and reverted back.

The point is, if you have very little experience, there’re tons of resources to help you out. Search them out. Lean on folks here for help when needed. You’ll be ok.

I had an in-person interview lined up after a phone interview went really well. However, I got offered a different position before the Linux interview was scheduled and I had to take it because I was unemployed and couldn’t gamble on it not working out.

I just got back into virtualizing Linux instances on Proxmox (had been on ESXi before the Broadcom fuckery). I’m considering going that route again as of just very recently.

This is one of those threads that I’m saving to my read-it-later app of choice because you never know. Awesome work, d3Xt3r.

Slap the bottoms of his bare feet with reeds until he complies. /s

If you want to persuade your friend down the road to give it another shot, try asking what things he’d like to do and see if you can configure everything in advance. It’s impossible to predict all future desires, but knocking out some of the bigger ones could help. Honestly, I’d be surprised if he tries again any time soon. Can’t blame him. We all have different levels of tolerance for drudgery vs wanting things to just work.

The Asahi team never fails to impress. You can support the project at their Patreon. You don’t need to care about Apple hardware to see the value in the work they’re doing getting ported over to ARM PCs. Who knows? You might be donating to the health of your preferred distro on a device you will own down the road.