Been messing around a bit with freedombox after seeing Mudflaps post on it.

I am really impressed. What freedombox basically is, it is a pre-configured server setup based upon debian bullet and cockpit control panel and apache2 webserver.

It is very minimalized of overhead bullshit that normally is included in a debian distribution, as a result the entire image is 3.7GB and only about half of that space is used by default, but it has all the normal debian based package management and you can install anything from bullet onto it.

I discovered to my amazement and sheer delight that the disk image format used by these single board computers is EXACTLY THE SAME as that used by kvm/qemu SO I can install this and have in a kvm/qemu virtual machine and by extension anything else meant for these single board computers.

I immediately expanded the disk image to 50GB and then expanded the file system to 42GB so I could have a dedicated swap partition and install a bunch of software that didn't come packaged with it, like x2go server for remote desktop access and the mate desktop.

I continue to be amazed though at how well they shaved off the bullshit, a single terminal session running consumes only 297k of memory total! Debian itself runs only marginally on a 1GB virtual machine but this runs totally smooth, and with 4GB and 12CPUs it absolutely screams.