Use of Armbian on old x86 server hardware

[Tim J]

I was curious if anyone has experience with using Armbian on older x86 server hardware systems.  This would be for a home-lab sort of setup.  In the past, I fought with Ubuntu Server and found that I missed the Armbian-Config utility that made setup a breeze.  (Specifically looking at WIWYNN LYRA-M SV315, INTEL XEON E5-2670 V2 SR1A7 2.5GHZ 10-C0RE)

 

I am planning to run a MariaDB instance for a scientific database.  My past test use was using Armbian on an 8 GB Raspberry pi 4B, with MariaDB, and it worked very well, until the SD card failed.

 

Any thoughts or points of caution before attempting this would be appreciated.  I have generally had a very positive experience with Armbian so far.

[cedric]

I never tried to run Armbian on Intel/AMD hardware. I only run it on my RockPi3A. Armbian does have an image on this page you can try:
https://www.armbian.com/uefi-x86/

 

Let me know how it goes.

Cheers,

Cedric

[Igor]

On 5/28/2023 at 10:50 PM, Tim J said:

Any thoughts or points of caution before attempting this would be appreciated.

 

I am running it on my ryzen 3950x, on i5 Lenovo laptop, on Threadripper 3990x build server, supermicro NAS and many virtual machines. Almost everywhere and tweaks that are generated into Armbian comes handy also on big irons. ZRAM helps also on machine with a 256Gb of memory

Armbian is live system with few things to set at first run, so installation is a bit different. However, armbian-install knows how to handle UEFI install too, so install from live USB/eMMC to SSD/eMMC goes the same way.

[Tim J]

I just wanted to give an update.  I did, indeed, get my server physically working.  However, I could not figure out how to install from the thumb drive to my hard drive.  After hitting a point of personal frustration, I went with Debian 12, as the installer figured out enough about the hardware to get me up and running.

 

HOWEVER, I will say that all of my testing and prototyping on Armbian systems was still of great value, and Armbian will continue to be the workhorse on my (way too many) single board computers, especially my collection of wayward Orange Pi systems.

 

Thank you for your response, Igor.  I absolutely respect the time you put into this and my hat is off to the entire team.

 

Tim

[Igor]

11 hours ago, Tim J said:

I could not figure out how to install from the thumb drive to my hard drive. 

Installation is not the strongest part yet as we are developing / extending our own installer. Installation is possible but its easy to hit into problems:
https://armbian.atlassian.net/browse/AR-1592 (probably others yet to be found)

Thank you for trying and encouragements!

[Timm0]

Do I understand this thread correctly that an installation on SSD/HDD does not work at the moment. I've been trying for several hours, but I thought it was due to my lack of Linux skills

[Igor]

On 10/8/2023 at 11:40 AM, Timm0 said:

Do I understand this thread correctly that an installation on SSD/HDD does not work at the moment.

It works, just you need to prepare partition in advance.