I’ve been eyeing these devices for some time now. The price point is… delicious!

I saw some opensource-ish project one day that mentioned that they are building an OS around Plex and other media servers and using these N5105s and selling the package for USD500ish (I think).

So I went hunting for the hardware and found it on Aliexpress for that cheap (sub USD200).

Does anyone have experience running these? How hard is it to get Ubuntu running on them? I dislike that they ship with Windows 11. Would be a few bucks cheaper if they shipped with Ubuntu or no OS, right?

Also, what about running docker on them? Can they support your usual homelab stuff? Portainer, Pi-hole, *arr softwares, a dashboard, etc.

@[email protected]
creator
link
fedilink
English
12Y

out of all those, I’m most curious about that MQTT server. What’s your usecase for that? These CPUs don’t support anything more than 16GB RAM, so there’s that :)

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
22Y

I think Home Assistant is too much of bloat for a couple of IR sensors and relays. Also, if I do everything on Home Assistant, I might not be able to migrate to something else in the future. For now, n8n+MQTT is what I’ll use.

Create a post

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.

Rules:

  • Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
  • No spam posting.
  • Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
  • Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
  • No trolling.

Resources:

> Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

> Questions? DM the mods!

  • 1 user online
  • 218 users / day
  • 9 users / week
  • 244 users / month
  • 841 users / 6 months
  • 0 subscribers
  • 542 Posts
  • 8.93K Comments
  • Modlog