optiplex 9020 sff details

Reliable and whisper quiet. $90 refurbed Core i7, 3.6GHz, typically manf around 2016. For sure, pacman usbutils and wireless_tools into these Optiplex's. Clear the back for ventilation

DisplayPort - $5

This is an advantage over HDMI. It splits the video from the sound, allowing a person to easily send the audio to their speaker system instead of the farking TV.

For video, purchase the DisplayPort to HDMI cable adapter $5 (above). The OS will detect the HDMI and adjust. For sound, run a standard 3.5mm audio line to the speaker system. Done.

WiFi - $15

Dell factory-configures WiFi on some MB's. None of the refurbs I've bought have it. As for USB dongles 99% of the ones on EBay are worthless Realteks RTL1881cu. Its USB signature (c811) is below. They're sold from $3 to $15 depending on how venal the seller is. The web is flooded with these pieces of garbage. I couldn't get them to work with special drivers off the AUR and wasted a day.

$ lsusb
ID 0bda:c811 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 802.11ac NIC

We want the "au" or "bu" chipset, not the worthless "cu" chipset (above), and we'll have to pay for it. Typically, we're paying $20-30. I found an Israeli supplier. The USB signature looks like this:

$ lsusb
ID 0bda:b82c Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 802.11ac NIC

This is the Realtek RTL8822bu.

The dongle should be detected by the kernel without installing a driver, eg...

$ iwconfig
< snip >
wlp0s20u11i2 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:off/any

A quick check of CONF file accuracy inside /etc/wpa_supplicant/ and all is good.

# wpa_supplicant -i wlp0s20u11i2 -B -D wext -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
# dhcpcd wlp0s20u11i2

Nice eh? Check this out. So I went through all the steps, which are useful to learn in some circumstances. Here's a relatively important screenshot, arguably

RAM - 32G $45

My refurb came with 8Gb (2x4G cards. The MB can take up to 64. Eight Gb certainly worked (Arch w/Ice WM), however there were occasional delays with memory hogs like Chromium, so I eventually bought 4 x 8Gb cards. There are 4 x 1600Mhz 240pin DDR3 slots. Alternating banks. One bank has white clips, the other has black.

One guy's RAM upgrade.

UEFI

I changed the BIOS to allow legacy BIOS for GRUB ease.

rant: Legacy BIOS have a password option, making it very hard for a physical hacker (typically only govt) to put in a USB and quickly duplicate one's HDD/SSD. So we got UEFI: there's no impediment to LEA's. But if we turn off UEFI, we lose the ability to password protect our BIOS. This makes it easy for both civilian and gov't physical access hackers. What to do?

rant (cont): Because the gov't likes UEFI, the situation going forward will likely be *only* UEFI. A post here seems to describe the future. It's annoying AF, sorta like a perpetual tax season. /rant

Back to GRUB -- we're going to have problems. There will likely be some workarounds, perhaps like this post, or this post. But we will have to learn them. Computers used to just work, in the pre-911 world. And UEFI will always need at least gparted to handle the GPT partitioning. All our old (hard-earned) partitioning skills with MBR, cfdisk, and fdisk will be out the window. Plus we will have to trick or drill into GRUB to make it install itself properly. A lot of reading, just to be able to run a BIOS password.