Ah. I'd get a Dell laptop a few years old, put in a fresh hard drive, and run OpenBSD instead of Linux. Much simpler and more reliable. I've been using it since about 2002, including on the only firewall machines I've built. I prefer the default FVWM to KDE for speed reasons but I've had no problems running KDE programs (Konqueror for example) under it. Gnome stuff works too, they should install the needed libraries. As far as I know, using a KDE or Gnome window manager works, they're just unneeded bloat.
The black on black sounds like a colormap problem. Or a framebuffer problem where it's using some odd color depth instead of 24, I see a problem like that with some HDMI modes and Raspbian on my Pis. But I've mostly had no X at all on my firewall machines. I used to run full-size i386 machines retired from being Windows machines. One bottleneck may be that you need _two_ fast network interfaces plus a third one for control. A laptop with a built-in interface plus a Cardbus card would maybe work for the fast ones. Use the built-in (fastest) for the external network if you're going to be filtering packets. On 11/8/16, Mark Morgan Lloyd <markmll.debian-...@telemetry.co.uk> wrote: > On 08/11/16 16:00, Alan Corey wrote: >>> Has anybody done this, are there comparable instructions for an RPi3, >>> and- above all- is there a straightforward kernel release suitable for >>> host and guest? >> >> I posted a similar question on the Raspberry Pi forums here: >> https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=154497&p=1010500#p1010500 > > Although the parts of the cited responses that I'm reading don't touch > on KVM etc. What I want to do is hide a mail (or other DMZ) server > inside a guest on a firewall system... which sounds a bit weird but > should be OK. > >> I got one response with some links in it but so far I'm still using >> Raspbian. It's very stable, which I care more about than being >> bleeding edge. I do the apt-get update and apt-get upgrade about once >> a month. I have 2 3Bs and a Zero, clone my SD card so I maintain 1 >> image. > > After experimentation we reverted to pukka Debian because we favour KDE, > and I was never able to get it grafted reliably onto Raspbian. > > I'm running with a USB-connected Seagate disc, that works well except > for cases where I reboot with e.g. a 3G 'phone tethered since it gets > the /dev/sd devices confused. I'm hoping that the new RPi3 firmware that > allows USB boot etc. improves that. > > I'm basically preparing an SD-Card using up-to-date Raspbian, and then > overwriting / with stuff from the link I gave earlier. Fix up locales > and run tasksel and that's about it. > > A colleague had Ubuntu aarch64 on an Odroid C2 and while it worked it > was definitely nothing to write home about- to the extent that he's now > reverted to my usual Debian mix and the hardware is back on my desk so > that I can investigate its I/O performance (which in principle is better > than that of an RPi3: it has Gbit Ethernet which isn't hung off the > USB). I'm not blaming the architecture for the problems, there's > definite distro packaging issues (e.g. remove no-longer-needed packages > and the desktop switches to black-on-black). > > ----- > > One of my ongoing jobs involves lots of L2TP stuff, if anybody's got the > standing please could they review > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=842346 since it makes a > big difference to reliability. > > -- > Mark Morgan Lloyd > markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk > > [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] > > -- Credit is the root of all evil. - AB1JX
