Impulse buy
A few months ago, I backed my first Kickstarter. For $29, I figured the sunk cost was minimal and I could probably figure out something useful to do with this:

Mine looks pretty much like this, including the fancy ABS enclosure.
PineA64+ (2 gigabyte model) stats:
- 1.2 GHz Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 64-Bit Processor.
- Dual I/O expansion slots
- Dual Core Mali 400 MP2 Graphics card
- 2GB Memory
- Integrated Display engine with HDMI 1.4 output up to 4K
- 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet Port
- Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11BGN Wireless Module Port (Add on module optional)
(In addition to the case, I got both optional modules and a VGA adapter; the tab came to around $55 all together. If you don’t already have a micro USB charger of appropriate amperage and/or USB keyboards and HDMI cables, you might need to spend a bit more.)
After a few months of waiting, it showed up and I realized that I forgot to buy some microSD cards. Amazon Prime to the rescue, I now have five 16GB microSD cards. Now what?
I played around a little with the RemixOS from the Pine64.org wiki page, but I don’t really need another mediocre desktop. More useful by far would be a low-powered Linux server within my LAN that I wouldn’t feel bad about leaving running all of the time. I’ve been wanting to set up a dedicated Minecraft server for a while so I can play with the kids from anywhere in the world, so that was the obvious application.
This isn’t really a how-to or guide so much as an annotated checklist for my own reference. I used this excellent blog post as a reference for most of these steps. It’s a little older, but the instructions are still good. I only really changed things from personal preference (Debian vs. Ubuntu) and to use SpigotMC vs. the vanilla server. Continue reading