This unassuming metal slab hides a computer of, well, very little power at all by 2015 standards, and even less so in Space Year 2026. Can we cajole it into doing something useful, for debateable standards of useful, something like running a streaming internet radio station?
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, let’s see if we can wring the last drops of utility from this not that odd, but mostly forgotten, and certainly obsolete PIPO X7.
If you thought my OG GPD Win was underpowered in 2026, you haven’t experienced the majesty of the PIPO X7. It’s 2 Watt, quad core Intel Atom Z3736F processor is about half as fast as the GPD Win’s, with half the RAM at 2GB of DDR3, and half the storage space with a slow 32GB eMMC drive.
It just about ran Windows 8.1 when I bought it back in 2015 for £80, and I’d wanted to have this as a media player box for the days before Smart TVs were so common a thing. It just about managed this for a while, but it can neither output a 4K signal nor playback most 4K media, so once that switch was made it has pretty much gathered dust in a cupboard for the best part of a decade.
I asked my good friend Steve what he thinks of the PIPO X7, and he called it a Stupid Piece of Trash. He’s probably right. I should just send this off to be recycled, but I think I can use this to tick off one project I’ve been thinking about doing for years.
I used to do a film review podcast with my friends, and I though a good promotional wheeze might be to set up a one hundred percent copyright infringing internet radio station, playing the themes of films we’re reviewed with some review recap attached to it. I never got round to it, and therefore dodged that lawsuit, but it occurs to me that this idea could be modified to get us away from the tyranny of Spotify’s algorithm into one we can control.
So, that’s the task before us today, getting a minimal install of some compatible modern Linux on to this poor little bastard, stuffing a bunch of music into it and forcing it to squirt that back out at random for my listening pleasure. I mean, it sounds weird when you say it that way, but this is normal human behaviour, right? I’m normal, right? This is normal. Yes. Normal.
At some point in the past I’d put Ubuntu on it for the giggles, this is version 18.04 and it is somewhat functional, even with the limited 2GB of RAM crippling it, but it’s not a great experience.
For example, YouTube drops frames massively, even at 480p, so that pretty much disqualifies it from the running for today’s computing. It’s not 100% useless, things like simple word processing in LibreOffice can be done well enough, and it can run graphics apps like Gimp if you don’t mind waiting around for the results for, well, way too long.
I tried to get some performance figures to show but Geekbench 6 crashes on this, eventually, and at any rate it was taking so long to do the single core results that I expect the results to be in the single digits.
If you are in the position of needing to use this or something like it for basic modern computing stuff, your best bet is probably AntiX Linux, which is about as stripped back a modern GUI operating system can be. As it happens, it’s also based on Debian Linux which I was going to use in its command line form so let’s give that a quick look over.
It installs fine, and it’s snappier and less resource hungry for sure, but it’s still struggling with YouTube playback and call me biased but that’s pretty much table stakes and this thing’s just too old to deal with YouTube’s default VP9 codecs. Things are a bit better with an extension that forces the use of the older h264 codec this thing has some support for, which makes it watchable, but still dropping frames. It feels a bit faster for general browsing too, so I suppose if you are in a situation where this is all you have for general purpose computing, AntiX Linux is my recommendation, but even as someone who’s very much pro modern computing on ancient hardware, this might be a bridge too far for me.
That said, there’s enough headroom available in terms of RAM and idle CPU usage even with the iceWM windows manager running that I’ll use this OS for this project and see how it turns out. I’d also like to further kick the tyres of a distribution that’s not really taking any design language from windows or MacOS, even if that does make it feel quite unfamiliar.
First off, we’ll double check everything’s up to date with the system and ensure a few prerequisites are installed.
We then install icecast, the streaming software. There’s a bit of a blip where the one major difference between AntiX and Debian rears its head and I need to find the older equivalent of systemctl for non-systemd service managers, which is service, so with that bridge crossed it should now start up on startup
We’re also installing liquidsoap, which handles the track selection part of the equation, and we’ll need to do a bit of password changing for ultimate security.
We’ll check they’re both running, then create a user that can own the music. This might be best practice but is not strictly required, and I almost immediately changed my mind and just kept it all in my own user account.
Let’s copy some music into the folders we’ve just setup. Seeing as we’re on YouTube, these are my own awful audio attempts, so we won’t get a copyright strike. It’s easy enough to change when it’s up and running.
We need to write a liquidsoap config to get us up and running, and I blindly trusted AI infested web searches to get this one, so I’m not overwhelmingly surprised that it doesn’t work once entered.
Hands up, it’s as much my fault for changing my mind about the user thing and not thinking it though. Correcting that bone headed error leads to a mildly frustrating evening of chasing other problems around.
After a few iterations of the liquidsoap script, I thought we had success with it seeming to be correctly picking up the mp3 file, but if we tune into the radio stream, we only hear the fallback sine wave. By this point I’m tired and want to sleep, so let’s pick it up tomorrow.
In case it’s an issue with the files themselves, I’ve dug out the uncompressed wav versions of these tracks rather than the mp3s. I doubt it to be honest as they can play back perfectly well outside of this streaming context, but it’s the easiest thing to eliminate.
Well, it wasn’t that, as we get the same results.
One more iteration of the script and, drum roll please, we have a success! Maybe a less appealing noise than a sine wave, but it’s working.
Not that there’s much point streaming to the same computer you’re sat at, so let’s confirm it’s working across my home by opening it up on my phone, and yes, there we go. Concept proven.
So now we have it up and running in concept, it would just be a matter of dropping a bunch of files in here and, at least at home, for me there would be little need for Spotify or equivalents. Of course, there’s no new music discoverability here, but for me this is ideal for quickly starting up background music without the choice paralysis of picking something from either my own massive library of ripped CDs, or the infinite shelves of a streaming service.
With a bit of work, we could also get this exposed such that it could be played outside the house, or set up another stream for different genres, for example, or another household member’s tastes.
I’m not doing that today, because, well, this was pretty much just a proof of concept to see if there was any value in it, and I think for me at least there is. That means if I ever get around to setting up that home server I keep putting off, one of the services with be this personal radio station, alongside a more general media server instance.
I’ll think I’ll keep this box around to see if there’s any more use we can wring out of its poor little underpowered heart, but until then, if you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.