Barebones/Ultra-Budget Linux Machine

[Dlyrium]

Usually I'm pretty decent when it comes to building PCs, but I don't have much experience down at this end of the spectrum!

I'm looking for a PC to run Linux on for as cheap as humanly possible. I'm not planning to spend more than £75 on this one, and the absolute maximum is £100 (US $150). This must be possible, because this exists:
http://www.ebuyer.com/704152-exdisplay- ... -bxbt-2807
I'm sure you could the component parts of that PC plus RAM and a hard drive, for cheaper than the prebuilt price, and that includes a wifi card which I don't need.

Literally all it's going to do is run an IRC client and surf the web most of the time, but it will need to be able to stream video from Youtube, Twitch and Netflix (as well as MLB.tv) occasionally, in HD. That's the tricky bit, I have no idea what sort of hardware is required for that.

Wireless isn't required (or in fact even preferred).

My budget is: £100/$150, but as little as possible.
I live in: Devon, UK
Operating system: Will most likely be Ubuntu. Some flavour of linux anyway, so doesn't need to be factored into budget.
Monitor: Already have one.
Gaming resolution : No gaming. Native resolution of the monitor is 1440*900 (yeah...).
Peripherals?: I plan to use Synergy, so not planning on needing peripherals. I do have a spare mouse and keyboard just in case though.
Will you do overclocking?: No.
What are you planning to do with the pc?: Mainly surfing the 'net, IRC and Skype video calls, occasionally streaming video.

Any help would be appreciated.

I have looked into the Raspberry Pi, but I'm not huge on the idea of using an SD card for the main storage device. That's possibly a silly thing to be hung up on given the rest of the features it has for the price, but... meh.

[Thaustar]

Well this is gonna be a tricky one. Not so much finding a suitable CPU but it'll prove much more troubling finding a suitable motherboard, since well, the CPU's that's around are on so old sockets that the boards do not really get manufactured anymore. Do you have an old one lying around that you could throw into it ? 'Cause all I can fix for ya (if that's to be included) will bump up the price quite significant. I have some experience throwing together some old pcs, and making them slave servers etc for my personal server house at home, but usually I have one or more parts lying around, which eventually makes the price go way down and I can do this pretty cheap.

I'd suggest you (as you've mentioned yourself) to look into a Raspberry Pi with your limited budget, it'll suit just about all your needs and more. There's plenty of versions of thoose now a days, but please write back if you have anything lying around that'll help out in regard to the pc build. In that case I can help you further.

[Dlyrium]

I don't know why I didn't think of that... I don't have anything major lying around myself, but I could probably cannibalise some old second hand crap from garage sales. I'll look into that.

I'll probably get the RasPi anyway just to play around with.

[Thaustar]

[QUOTE="dlyrium, post: 28206, member: 43283"]I don't know why I didn't think of that... I don't have anything major lying around myself, but I could probably cannibalise some old second hand crap from garage sales. I'll look into that.

I'll probably get the RasPi anyway just to play around with.[/QUOTE]

You should, it's great fun to work with a Raspberry Pi Just got the 2.0 a few days ago, and haven't gotten to touch it yet, but looking forward to it. Just need a little spare time to work on it, which I don't really have at the moment, but the first version was great fun playing with Made a nice emulating machine for it, with an integrated webbrowser for surfing the web quick and easy without turning on my main pc. Never really did youtube videos etc but the Raspbery Pi 2.0 has included a Broadcom BCM2836 ArmV7 Quad-Core (900 Mhz) processor which has built-in VideoCore IV (4) which is fully capable of displaying FullHD 1080p. At my local shop I can pick it up for the equivalent of £35 or so, so it'll be a great bet for you to go with.

On the other hand, it's always super fun to disassemble / assemble a desktop PC / server, so you can always (as you mentioned) go on the prowl for an old motherboard for a low price, on sites like craiglist (and the like in UK), and then we can pick it up from there. If that's the way you wanna go about it, well then we can easily assemble something for a very low cost for you.