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Comment by hypercube33 | Hacker News Reader

I love looking back 10+ years for the cheapest Linux thing you could buy. People were buying devices that were for kids or a router or something and repurposing it because it was open enough to get a shell on / flash Linux to it and start doing projects with.

In the 2020s or somewhere before that we got a bunch of dedicated cheap MCUs that were good enough and I think stole the thunder from full Linux but there are still projects to run it on things like the ESP32 family.

Either way, hardware hacking is still my favorite hobby to watch.

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For a while, and I think even still today, the cheapest linux thing you can buy that has USB ports, wifi, and a power adapter are those Rockchip CPU powered Android TV boxes that are super popular from aliexpress and the like. There were people getting pretty mainline Linux distros on them. They have all moved on to be more expensive now (with 8GB RAM and way more cores than needed), but if you look back at ones from a few years ago you can find ones that were 1GB or 2GB of ram with a bit of eMMC storage and a quad core arm CPU roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi 3 in performance. Unlike a lot of these linux microcontroller-sized boards, you got barrel jack power in, HDMI video out, wifi, usb ports, an audio out, and a nice case for it. What you lack is exposed GPIO usually. At one point you could find them for around $24. FOr people who don't need the GPIO and instead want to use a keyboard/mouse/monitor with one, I think those are often better options than the SBC market embedded-style dev boards. I think you still can if you look hard enough.

> They have all moved on to be more expensive now (with 8GB RAM and way more cores than needed)

even the exact same model that I use for, ahem, iptv purposes has ballooned in price by 50% over the past few years, despite no design upgrades/changes :(

One of these days, I will do a project with linux on a cheap Rockchip handheld game console. Many already have builds of rocknix which is a retro game focused OS with mainline latest kernels. Many of these can be had for < $50 and boot from sdcard, and have wifi and bluetooth.

MSM8916 USB modems are very cheap, too – I got two for <$10 each. Has USB, Wi-Fi, 4G and three blinkenlights (red, green and blue). No video out though (but some slightly more expensive models of “portable Wi-Fi router” variety have a display and a battery).

https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/

https://wiki.nura.eco/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_(generic...

My friend has gotten full Linux on a number of weird RISC-V boards. https://github.com/queenkjuul/milkv-duo-ubuntu

Milk-V Duo has been a pretty popular RISC-V board, one of the more mainstream affordable RISC-V boards. We did a reading group on RISC-V machine code where we used this as the initial board. It even has it's own fcked up vector instructions that are based an RVV draft with some extensions. gcc has its own arch specifier for it (xtheadvector*, e.g. -march=rv64gc_xtheadvector).

The Jupiter 2 has standard RVV, but also another set of cores that are designed for AI with non standard matrix instructions...

I wonder if AI could port more modern kernel versions/fixes back to old kernels for vintage Android phones. You have wifi + modem, good screens, battery, fast CPUs, the hw package is unbeatable, so it's sad to see all those phones relegated to the dumpster.

This market is huge, but I think that simply using old phones to install the new system doesn't seem to have any selling points.

Latest ESP32 S31 can runs MMU Linux amd support an Ethernet port and other wireless systems [1].

The board mentioned in the post is like a barebone mini RPi that cost only USD$20, a fraction of the cost for normal RPi.

A more complete embedded system with the same ESP32 cost a real bargain at USD$80 incorporating sensors, display, etc [2].

[1] The ESP32 S31 Runs Linux:

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/91-hardware/19197-the-esp...

[2] ESP-Mosaico centers dual-core RISC-V ESP32-S31 around a 2.16-inch square AMOLED:

https://linuxgizmos.com/updated-esp-mosaico-centers-dual-cor...

Bought some RP2040-zero for less than a dollar last year including shipping. They can run Fuzix.

If you want Linux for very little money, there are still options. There's the MilkV Duo which is probably the cheapest at less than $10. Kind of like the Raspberry Pi Zero, but worse.

Hey, why not check your old conference badges, chances are one of them can run Linux!

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