{"id":67,"date":"2017-03-14T15:16:38","date_gmt":"2017-03-14T15:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jweaton.org\/?p=67"},"modified":"2017-03-14T15:16:38","modified_gmt":"2017-03-14T15:16:38","slug":"silent-running-or-back-to-the-x-term-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jweaton.org\/?p=67","title":{"rendered":"Silent Running, or, Back to the X-Term of the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

I bought one of these<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

put 8GB of memory and a 120GB SSD in it and mounted it on the wall.\u00a0 So now I have (more or less) a modern-day quad-core X-Terminal with a gigabit network connection running Debian and Gnome.<\/p>\n

Next, I moved my former noisy, heat-generating deskside system to the basement and, voila, sweet silence!\u00a0 All I hear now is the residual ringing in my ears that is probably the result of attending too many loud rock-n-roll shows in my youth.\u00a0 But that’s a story for a different time…<\/p>\n

My home directory remains on the system that used to sit beside the desk.\u00a0 It has a 6-core AMD CPU and a pair of disks in a RAID-1 configuration.\u00a0 Accessing the files over the gigabit network seems fine, at least for normal usage.\u00a0 And even though the new ZBOX has pretty modest specs, it is more than sufficient for most of the things I do: email, web browsing, and running Octave for testing.\u00a0 I don’t use it\u00a0 for building Octave.\u00a0 For that I have a couple of other systems also located down in the basement where I can’t hear them.<\/p>\n

Total cost was about $250.\u00a0 I figured that wasn’t too much to pay for silence.\u00a0 And\u00a0if it turned out that the performance wasn’t great, I could always save up a few more pennies to buy a different model that has a faster processor and\/or more memory and then reuse this box as a firewall – it does have 2 separate ethernet ports, as if it were intended to be used for that purpose.\u00a0 Or maybe as an HTPC since it also has an HDMI output and Intel graphics that are supposed to support up to 4k graphics (I don’t know, my monitor works great with this system but it is just 1980 x 1200).<\/p>\n

Setup was pretty easy and Debian installed without any problems from a USB stick.<\/p>\n

It takes about 35 seconds to boot up to a gdm3 login screen.\u00a0 That includes a few seconds each for POST and grub delays.\u00a0 I could eliminate those and save a few seconds but then it would be harder to enter the BIOS or change boot parameters.\u00a0 And how often do I reboot anyway?<\/p>\n

From the login screen to a terminal window is another 15 seconds or so.\u00a0 And that’s all with a 1.6GHz Celeron processor.\u00a0 If I’d splurged and spent a few hundred more for the Core i5 version, I guess I’d be up and running in about 30 seconds?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I bought one of these: put 8GB of memory and a 120GB SSD in it and mounted it on the wall.\u00a0 So now I have (more or less) a modern-day quad-core X-Terminal with a gigabit network connection running Debian and Gnome. Next, I moved my former noisy, heat-generating deskside system to the basement and, voila, … Continue reading “Silent Running, or, Back to the X-Term of the Future”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jweaton.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jweaton.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jweaton.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jweaton.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jweaton.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jweaton.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"https:\/\/jweaton.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jweaton.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jweaton.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jweaton.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}