Linux

UDOO single board computers are based on x86 CPU's, rather than the typical ARM CPU's used by other SBC's. Therefore UDOO boards have a significant performance advantage, at a cost. With the UDOO Bolt, they've outdone themselves thanks to the capabilities of the Ryzen V1000 family. The UDOO Bolt is the first Single Board Computer using an AMD processor, and the V1000 family gives it phenomenal performance thanks to a 4 core CPU design coupled with a high end GPU and direct support for ethernet, 2x SATA ports, eMMC and more.

It's common to mount the entire Ubuntu system on one partition on one drive. It's very easy to set that up, simply format an ext4 filesystem for the entire disk, and away we go. How do you transition such a system to have /home on a second drive? The GUI tools don't support doing this, so what do you do? A big consideration is that while logged in you're using /home, and therefore can't delete that filesystem while it's in use.

Ubuntu is supposed to be a well-tested easy-to-use Linux, so when I wanted to run gparted to format a new drive it was frustrating I had to jump so many hoops to launch the program. Fixing the problem of launching gparted on Ubuntu turned out to be easy, but difficult to first determine what went wrong and the fix.

Ubuntu is supposed to be fairly simple to use with lots of attention put on a solid/reliable well-thought-out Linux user experience. My experience setting up a multi-drive Ubuntu computer showed it's not quite as smooth a user experience as the Ubuntu reputation would lead you to believe.

Ubuntu is supposed to be an easy-to-use Linux distribution where everything just works. If so, why doesn't copy/paste work with the default terminal program? It's quite common to copy/paste text and other data between applications. Speaking for myself, I am frequently writing tech tutorials like this one, and therefore must frequently copy text from a terminal session, or into a terminal session, to write the tutorial. Using gnome-terminal, the default terminal app on Ubuntu, it's a frustrating experience because copy/paste does not work fluidly with gnome-terminal on Ubuntu. Further, the fix is unsatisfying and incomplete.

Docker is a powerful basis for cloud computing especially if you use Docker Swarm's. This tutorial shows how to autoscale Docker images over a cluster of inexpensive Raspberry Pi Zero computers. It's an interesting way to learn about Docker and using Docker Swarms. The example shows autodeployment of Node-RED instances to individual Pi Zero's which is raises interesting ideas in my mind.

A downside to this example is the laborious setup. Each Pi Zero must have a customized boot SD card created. Seems to me that marrying this idea with the "Cluster HAT" hardware might be easier to manage, since you don't create a customized SD card for each machine in the cluster.

For more information on the UDOO Advanced Plus. Both the UDOO and LattePanda are inexpensive single-board-computers that are useful for building custom computers. This video compares the two, and finds the UDOO is more powerful and more flexible. Both run Windows very well as long as your needs are somewhat modest. Both are more powerful and flexible than the Raspberry Pi, another favorite of building custom computers.

The UDOO Advanced Plus is so much higher priced than most single-board-computers that it doesn't fit the Maker Project idea. At $160 or so per board it's not like taking a $35 Raspberry Pi to toss into a project. Where the UDOO shines, though, is as a desktop computer. Because it has an x86 CPU, it runs regular operating systems, and the board includes normal ports for connecting to SSD's and hard disks and whatnot. The peripherals include a pair of M.2 ports for WiFi and SSD support, a SATA to connect up a regular disk, 3x USB3 for high speed peripherals, an HDMI and 2x Mini Display-Port connectors allowing you to connect three large screen monitors, etc. In other words, while the UDOO is a smallish computer, it's got a lot of powerful capabilities.