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by milsorgen 4236 days ago
I've had fun running a Terraria server for 2 people on it. TShock server via Mono and some optimizations and overclocking. Runs fairly well to be honest but looking beyond that I agree it is just too slow to do most things I want to do.

I've had my eye on something along the lines of: http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code...

Quadcore, 2gb of RAM for 65, seems like a nice step up from the Pi.

2 comments

I have a U2 (basically the same as the U3 with less ports), and the thing is so good I used it as a desktop for a couple of weeks (http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2013/02/10/1230) - running NetBeans at a fair clip, to boot. The only thing stopping me from getting a couple of U3s is lack of cash, and I heartily recommend it.

The Pi is... Sort of mediocre as a desktop (even as a thin client) and too complex for most hardware projects. We ran a number of them as digital signage clients for a while (https://github.com/sapo/digital-signage-client) and eventually moved to Android boxes (https://github.com/sapo/android-signage-client) because even with the recent improvements to WebKit and X the browser simply wasn't up to par.

Worked reasonably nicely with videos, but I keep wondering how much more useful the Pi would have been (for signage, mind you) if they had released their internal Android build.

Edit: forgot to mention I have five Model Bs in a cluster (http://github.com/rcarmo/raspi-cluster) where I run distcc and toy with Java/Clojure/Hazelcast. It's fun, but requires a fair bit of patience.

You can check the load here: http://rcarmo.sl.pt:8888

If only they didn't ask a hard 25$ for shipping.
Careful -- That's 65 without the necessary eMMC you must buy to boot it. Makes it at least $80 + shipping for the small 8GB eMMC module.

These things look nice, but I've read some stories about being difficult to get a custom distro to boot (ie. one other than the default distro downloadable on their site.). If the default spin of ubuntu is good enough for you, that's great, but you probably wont get fedora arm booting or anything.

http://www.wandboard.org/

Wandboard is nice -- quad core, 2gb ddr3, 2 mSD slots, SATA, etc. It's a bit more expensive, but from what I've seen creeping the hardware forums, it has better compatibility.