As many of you know, there was a Raspberry Pi shortage just not long ago. All models starting from the Pi Zero to Pi 4 which was the latest were not available. This meant that many people had three options:
- Pay the really high prices
- Wait and hope that the shortage will be over soon or;
- get another type of Single-Board Computer.
At first, I wanted to wait for the shortage to be over and be able to get a Raspberry Pi as I was also worried things may break if I used another type of SBC with a different type of CPU especially since I was still learning how to use Linux and set up all sorts of things. However, this changed whilst I was on a trip away from home and I relied heavily on some services hosted at home. I kept hitting either the bandwidth bottleneck or the fact that there was not enough computing power on my existing Raspberry Pi systems. And yes, I used two in my setup as one wasn’t enough.
When I came back from my trip in March this year, I decided to take the risk and order an alternative called Renegade from LibreComputer as the other, more famous, option from the company wasn’t powerful enough for my needs. Obviously, I am talking about LePotato.
At first, I researched the company a bit and if the specific board has any sort of software support from the community and I got really some really interesting findings but nothing bad. The Renegade seems to be made by a third party, not LibreComputer themselves which isn’t bad. I would’ve loved to have a link to the manufacturer’s page on LibreComputer’s website as the manufacturer goes a bit more in-depth on the GPIO. This is a “nice-to-have” on the website as a customer can quickly validate that Firefly and LibreComputer work together to bring the Renegade on the market but I don’t see that as an issue. The GPIO seems to be the same as the one on the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ that I am most familiar with so I placed the order for the 4GB model and waited.
After a few weeks, it finally arrived. The first thing I’ve noticed is that it is really similar to the Pi 3B+ form factor and will even fit on my existing mini-tower of Pi’s which was amazing for me. Then, I decided to flash Armbian to an SD card as that seemed to be the only official way of getting a Debian version on the system (as I wasn’t comfortable downloading ISOs only from LibreComputer).
After that finished, I booted it for the first time. At first, it seemed a bit quicker to boot than my other Raspberry Pi 3B+. That may be a combination of the faster CPU (processor) and the distro maybe being a bit lighter than Rasbian.
The first thing I have tried is to install OpenMediaVault on it so I can benefit from the gigabit ethernet port which was a massive improvement over the 100 Mbps ethernet port on the Pi 3B+. The major issue I had was finding the right Armbian version supported by OMV. Other than that, it really just worked exactly as I’ve set up my Raspberry Pi 3B+ with the exact commands.
There are some quirks such as turning on some OMV plugins such as WireGuard VPN would cause the system to not boot after a reboot or a power outage. There is also the fact that you cannot turn on Docker by using the OMV Web UI so you have to do it through the terminal. Other than those two issues, it was really smooth accessing my stuff through my local network with Samba or through my Nextcloud instance on my phone.
I have been using it for the past 7 months and I had no issue with it. I managed to set up my Docker containers (Uptime Kuma, Nextcloud and more) on it whilst running OMV on it. No hiccups whatsoever. One small thing would probably be that if you really want to set up a Jellyfin server, this would not work as you will hit an issue with the encoding but I don’t need that sort of service for now.
In all fairness, it can be scary at first especially since not a lot of materials are present about it but it is more or less the same experience once you manage to get Armbian running on it. Not as many forum posts or really detailed guides if something goes wrong but, in my opinion, is best if you play around with Linux for a little bit or even if you want to learn it yourself as I learned using the terminal quicker by not having guides available every single time especially if you manage to get is at a lower cost than the actual Raspberry Pi.
That does not mean you should discard Raspberry Pi boards for being “the more expensive option” but I think that for starting out, you don’t need really powerful things like the upcoming Pi 5. At least for me, that was the thing that attracted me to the Raspberry Pi 3 when I was 13. It was a really small computer at a really affordable price which wasn’t really powerful but I always wanted to see how many things it could run until it just could not do anything anymore.
As for the ending, I may look into making small articles about running stuff on the Renegade with Armbian but I think it can run much more than just Armbian nowadays. If you have any thoughts to share, let me know in the comments and share this article around with your friends if you really enjoyed it! Stay safe until next time.
