Intel NUC
Recently I purchased an Intel NUC, the NUC5i5RYK. This is the most recent Intel Core i5 NUC available. I purchased it with 2 sticks of Kingston 8GB 1600MHz DDR3L (KVR16LS11/8), and a Transcend 512 GB SATA III MTS600 60 mm M.2 SSD (TS512GMTS600).
Which Linux?
I had decided to install Arch Linux, after giving the ARM version a test drive on the Raspberry Pi 2. Arch seems quite a bit like Gentoo, but without the need to bootstrap and recompile your system from scratch (unless you want to, I suppose). I like the fact that it's a rolling release, like Gentoo, so that you're never reinstalling the whole OS as is required by other popular distributions.
Arch Installation on the NUC
Anyway, it took me a while to get it setup on the NUC, as it has been quite a long time since I've started from scratch like that (Raspberry Pi doesn't count--it's too easy to start with, on purpose). Once I received it, I put the RAM and the SSD into the machine and started it up. However, the display wouldn't come up on the LCD.
At first I thought my Mac MiniDP-to-DVI cable was bad, so I tested it on another system (which I knew worked), and sure enough, it was faulty (it's been around for about four years now). Then I tried a MiniDP-to-VGA adapter, after spending some time rummaging around in the garage and other depths of the house looking for a VGA cable), and found that the NUC still wouldn't display. I knew the VGA adapter wasn't faulty, so I looked online to see if anyone else had similar problems. I did find a post on the Intel site about a similar issue, but no response.
The only thing I encountered was that the power lamp would blink (three times in a sequence, I think), and if you hooked up audio, you could hear the beeps along with the blink (deafening at full-volume). This repeated until it was powered down, but would restart after powering it up again.
Alas, I decided to open the box back up to check the SSD and RAM connections. Sure enough, the RAM wasn't seated properly. Once I did that, I was up and running with installing Arch.
UEFI
Once I finished the installation and configured and installed GRUB, I rebooted. The result was nothing but a screen with GRUB at the top-left (or infinitely repeated on different occasions). I encountered this when I first migrated from LILO to GRUB, but this time I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't boot. So I started reading more of the Arch docs (great docs, btw), and realized that the NUC is a UEFI system. So I reconfigured the boot partition as an EFI boot partition, reconfigured GRUB and restarted. Now it booted up without a hitch.
So, UEFI was something new to me--as again, it had been a very long time since I've maintained a Linux box--last one was at a previous employer, where I ran Gentoo on the desktop and the laptop they gave me to use.
Systemd
The other thing was that I wasn't familar with systemd to configure services, so once I learned how to configure networking and a couple other services, I was good to go. I'm still getting used to it, but it seems (in some ways) simpler tha what was done previously (that I recall, at least).
What did I do with it? Minecraft!
One of the first things I wanted to do was setup a couple Minecraft servers for my kids. I thought about using Docker, but my Docker-fu is still lacking, so I decided to start the servers up using another favored tool--Screen. It doesn't really matter if the servers are up after a reboot--they're not critical systems, though my kids might be a bit unhappy for a while. It's really a matter of opening SSH to myself for me to start them.
And beyond...
I'm really not completely sure what I want to do with the NUC. I knew I wanted a server at home, and this was the perfect option for something small and quiet, and yet would not take 600W of energy.
As for now, it will serve as a Minecraft server and my blogging platform (via a laptop), from which I'll deploy the blog.
We'll see what time allows.