Episode: 2380
Title: HPR2380: Raspbian X86 on P4 Tower
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2380/hpr2380.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 02:00:33

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This is an HBR episode 2,380 entitled Rusty and X86 on B4 Tower and in part on the series Hardware Upgrades.
It is hosted by Tony Huma, Tony H1,212 and in about 4 minutes long and Karima Clean Flag.
The summary is, this is a show on installing Bixel on a Pentium 4 Tower PC.
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Hello this is Tony Hughes again in Blackpool in the UK and I recorded a show
few weeks ago about running Raspberry and Pixel on X86 on a Lenovo X61S.
And as I said in that show, I was interested to see how it perform on what I know,
plus it's quite old hardware in the form of the Pentium 4 Tower.
So we have a spare tower at the makerspace which gets you used to test low
resource-operated systems to see if they live up to their name, so on Saturday.
Yesterday is the right day but a few weeks ago about the time this show goes out.
I put the X86 Raspberry and Image on the tower to see how it perform.
Specifications are Pentium 4, 2.8GB CPU, 2GB DDR RAM and a 40GB spinning hard drive,
which in its day was a very useful bit of kit, but as technology has moved on and most people
wouldn't consider it as a usable working PC today.
First problem I encountered was the DVD drive with Duff and I didn't have the image on the
flash drive, but luckily I did have my trusty little USB DVD in the back,
so I hooked that and booted into the boot menu and set the disc off load in the LS.
I'll not go into this again because I ran through the install process last time
for anyone who's not heard it, that was HPR episode 2362, but the install went well and I was
left with the new install the pixel on the tower. So I went through the new install process
and I did last time and was left with an up-to-date and password secure PC,
so my next thing was to reboot to see what the resource use would be at the first boot.
And when I rebooted the system manager I was amazed to see that it was a constant 66
megabit of RAM and about 1% CDU usage. When I turned on Chrome this pushes the RAM usage
to over 100 megabytes, but it was smooth, easy to cope with navigate into resource hungry sites
such as YouTube and the BBC, so I considered it past the first test.
Our next open-the-word document in LibreOffice, initially this took about 10 seconds to load,
but once opened it was perfectly usable. No obvious lag, so it should provide the
gov office capable PC. So you can use the web, you can write documents, it has an email client
or you can use web mail and it's not painfully slow. I think this PC would make a very usable
home work first computer for a child with pixel installed or a computer for an older member of
the family that just needed to keep in touch with family and friends without breaking the bank.
In fact, you could probably pick up a working tower of off-the-likes of
freegle or free cycle for nothing and you may even get a small 17 or 19 HTFT monitor from the same
place. Yes, it's not as energy efficient as the latest bit of kit, but as it said the last time
the cost of a new PC or laptop can buy a lot of additional electricity in the time that you may
run it before it finally expires. Okay, so that's my review of Pixel X826 on a Pentium 4 tower,
bye bye for now and I'll talk to you again soon. Bye.
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