I found an old notebook PC lying around and I’m wondering if it could be enough to run a few services like the arr suite, qbittorrent and pi-hole.
Here’s a few specs: Cpu : Intel Celeron 1011 1.6ghz Ram : 1Gig Ethernet port
If you think it’s not a total waste of time, what distro would you install?
Total waste of time. Get the newest Pi or equivalent
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Be aware that some old laptops had weird combined chipsets that Linux just can’t use… I tried putting Linux Mint on a friend’s laptop for their kids to use and the networking (wifi and cable) just wouldn’t work… it was something that only Win98 / WinXP could use (from memory).
So just try anything in case you just need to ditch it - as someone else mentioned, treat it as a learning exercise.
Thanks! I had installed Mac OSX on it back in the day so I’m hopeful.
you can probably even host your firewall in it
I would look into buying a mini PC and throwing a hypervisor on it.
I’d like to go low cost at the beginning but thanks!
You can get one use for 80-100 USD and it will last you for years.
If you get tired of that, you can probably turn it into a virtual fish tank and Johnny Castaway machine. (1GHz atom, 1gb RAM, XP)
I’m sorry but why would you do this
Other than “because I could”, I have no answer
Novelty only.
Keeping real fish is tedious and time consuming.
I wouldn’t dare to charge that old battery up. Some of them can start a fire.
Thanks, it’s removable
It sounds too slow. Save yourself time and sanity.
Alpine. But you are very low on the RAM. I will buy more RAM if I can (DDR2(?)).
+1 I’m surprised nobody else mentioned it. Alpine seems to be able to run on anything.
I run some of my services (until very recently including jellyfin) on my HP pavilion G6 from 2007. It still runs my wireguard, backup pihole, heimdall, etc. I run it on Linux mint (it was familiar) and cant do most things on screen (lags hard) but I can ssh or VNC in just fine
Thanks that’s good to know! Any performance issues? Are you torrenting with it?
I torrented and seeded many torrents (its still seeding right now) and it can do at least 2 (havent tried more) jellyfin streams at once as long as I disable server side transcoding to reserve resources. I had the full arr suite of apps running along with ombi (gonna move to jellyseer, but imo ombi used too much ram on my 4GB laptop to be something I kept running). Is it perfect? No, it has quirks that will come up now and again but can I really complain when getting now 16 years of use out of a laptop I never thought I’d touch again once I built my desktop?
Edit: oh be aware, if you’re using old hardware, DO NOT use the newest versions of things like Linux mint, it possibly won’t have drivers that works for really old hardware (like wifi card, Lan card, etc.) and it won’t be easily apparent sometimes. I solved this with a friend who had the same laptop as me but couldn’t get internet once installing mint. It turns out he used a newer version of mint that did not have a way to support his wifi card and installing and older version solved it
Ha! Funny that, I had issues with my WiFi card too! I could connect but wouldn’t have the right certificates. I solved this by using an Ethernet cable.
You’ll probably save money in the long run using a pi.
I did the math:
11 years? Nevermind use the laptop for sure haha
Your math is wrong. If the Celeron runs 65W at idle then it is consuming at minimum 1.56kWh a day, at a price of €0.20 per kWh you’re looking at a minimum operating cost of €113.88 a year.
You didn’t factor in that days have 24 hours, not one hour.
Woops. You are correct.
Any distro. Energy consumption may be higher. Apart from that all good (I guess)
I’ve got Pi-hole and Syncthing running on an old netbook with an Atom CPU and 2 GB RAM. It’s doing fine. Syncthing killed the little dual-core CPU while it was syncing all of the stuff I wanted, but now it idles along quietly on Debian. I doubt you’re going to get much out of the machine, but it’s perfectly fine for small, simple stuff like Pi-hole.
Distro-wise, I’d say Debian or similar if you want to set-and-forget (update once a week or month) or Arch/openSUSE Tumbleweed if you want it up-to-date (potentially more work needed).
Considering the hardware I’d also recommend whichever distro you go with without a GUI to keep the resource usage as low as possible.
Thanks, very helpful !
Go for a vintage correct OS for a challenge, try Haiku!
Hannah Montana Linux
Hey, Haiku is a “modern” OS too :)
I tried this recently with a 10 year old laptop. Much better specs than that. 6GB RAM, ran W10 incredibly slowly due to HDD.
I couldn’t even boot the Ubuntu USB installer.
6GB is more than enough for many desktop environments. Plus, a server wouldn’t have any anyway. not booting the Ubuntu installer seems like a bug, or other non-resource problem. if you try with a newer installer, or some other distro, that computer can host many things.
Yeah, it should have been fine. Was latest Ubuntu as well. Maybe something iffy about the laptop hardware, some obscure thing that wasn’t supported. In any case it’s gone now.
