which board should i get?

[zpimp]

hello everyone

would like to buy a sbc and i dont know which would be better, need some sugestions

done some research, and the best seem to be the orange pi stuff, judging by stability, community, connectivity and price

heard bad stuff about banana pi, which i was looking to get initially, and pine64

 

i plan to use it as a minipc/server

im using linux on all my other pc's (x86)

what board you think is better?

it is important to me to have working drivers (video/wifi), not necessarely binary blobs, even opensource

(i am very satisfied with the state of open source video drivers on x86)

please share your experiences

[Superkoning]

I just bought and received a FriendlyELEC NanoPi NEO2 because it's cheap (15 USD ex shipping), it's tiny, it's 64-bit and it has a GigE. 

 

And so far I like it very, very much. Armbian Ubuntu works flawlessly only it. Impressive.

 

Please note: the NanoPi NEO2 has no HDMI or other video out.

[gnasch]

I had good experience with OpiPcPlus, its wifi is reasonably working and it can be used as an "always on" PC as long as you do not want to decode video within the browser.

 

OpiPc(without plus) is working here for almost a year as a small public DNS server, no problems at all. Updates are bad though because the wifi driver for the external UsbWifi dongle has to be recompiled with every kernel change.

Please look for a stable 5V2A supply and one of the recommended SD cards, then you should be fine.

 

best, gnasch

 

 

[corq]

I have a good few of the boards on this list. I literally won't buy a board now until it's supported by Armbian, at least as a proof of concept. I can't say enough nice things about the Pine64, it's beefy and cheap, and I'm using it as an SDR server as it seems to handle the audio streaming over my network without drop or buffering issues. I have a 3 year old CubieTruck that is a server to my S.O.'s SDR for the same purpose. The cubietruck hardware wise has been really solid, still running from nand, tho I did finally wear out my older cubietruck with excessive flashing, it still runs like a champ from a class 10 microsd. The Pine64 has great vendor support so far and the cubietruck is getting "long in the tooth" but most of the issues are known and fixable and pretty well documented depending on what you're using it for. 

 

Good luck!

[zpimp]

did some comparison from wiki, and double checking on other sites, and price from aliexpress

after eliminating some stuff im looking at the best imo - plus2e

 

can someone give more detail about the video driver situation/performance

can it run lxde? or openbox

can it play local videos (mplayer)?

would it be possible to play quake1/quakespasm(if i can find a working port) ?

 

about armbian

since there is no video in browser, is it cause of video driver, or the cpu is just too slow?

i just tested an ~2002 amd with 512mb ram wich couldnt play youtube, but on x86 i used smtube/gtktube (cpu was too slow)

 

will read kaiser's posts a few more times (lots of stuff)

before asking more questions and making a decision

 

thank you very much for your help