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?
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
Novelty only.
Keeping real fish is tedious and time consuming.
Other than “because I could”, I have no answer
Worst case, give it a go, learn the process even if it can’t handle it, and you’ll be able to do it easier when you have a capable machine.
Thanks, that is the idea!
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.
DietPi (it runs on PCs)
No
It depends on the size of your budget (if it exists at all). Your probably better off doing some e-waste dumpster diving. Shoot for something with a 3rd gen i3 / i5 or newer and at least 4gb of RAM.
That generation is when Intel added MPEG hardware encoder so it opens up a lot of options for self-hosting media servers.
Puppy Linux!
Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Gentoo, Peppermint…
Some others like damn small linux or nano Linux or Linux lite.
They really didn’t fast for old computers, most of them didn’t support x32 already, they eating many resources of ram and processor… In real world they didn’t light as declared.
Crunch bang plus plus retro af
Thanks!
I self host using Debian on a 2010 macbook pro with a core 2 duo in it. It works well.
Upgrade ram to the max and set zram and everything will be good to go
you can probably even host your firewall in it
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.
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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!
Edit: I did manage to install Puppy Linux onto it, but I was severely limited by the CPU which is 32bits. I’m trying another old laptop next! Thanks everyone!
