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?
It’s doable but you should treat it more as a learning opportunity than a production system. Honestly, that’s old enough that a RPi might be able to run circle around it.
The Celeron 1011 is a 32bit processor, so Debian or Gentoo may be the only distributions that still support it and you will probably have to compile from source anything you want to run. A gig of ram was good for its time.
The Linux Unplugged crew from Jupiter Broadcasting are currently doing a 32bit challenge to see if such systems are still usable for day to day usage. It’s going to be interesting.
Found the spec sheet on that processor for anyone who’s interested.
I tried with a Celeron 1 GHz. It was slower than a rpi and it sucked 65 watts at idle 🙈
But at least can give some experience, I prefer playing the sysadmin with real hardware than a VM
65 w at idle? Hahahah, holy smokes!
I have a PII laptop from 1998 sitting around, still runs, don’t have the heart to pitch it. But now you’ve got me thinking… That’s a lot of juice.
Maybe it would be a neat experiment in using it via Wake-on-LAN from something else. But if it can wake from something else, that something else likely has more oomph anyway!
That’s good to know ha ha! At least I can have some fun before investing further…
It is 100% a great idea to see how you feel about the concept of self-hosting with an old machine. If it’s really old (and I’m talking like anything from before about 2008-2010), perhaps consider snagging an old “tiny”/1L-class box from eBay for cheap. Dell, HP, and Lenovo units can be found for WAY under $100 all the time, and slightly more modern units can still be had at a reasonable price, depending on the model. They’re great platforms to play around with. Just shove a cheap SSD in there and play with it.
Source: an old m920q with an i5-8500T is running pfSense for my home network
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.
Go for a vintage correct OS for a challenge, try Haiku!
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.
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)
Assuming you mean Celeron 1017u, that’s a dual core ivy bridge with 2mb l3. Plenty fast. Get some used ram and you’ll be good to go
No
No, just get a raspberry pi instead
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VNC Virtual Network Computing for remote desktop access
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
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Alpine. But you are very low on the RAM. I will buy more RAM if I can (DDR2(?)).
I don’t know about the whole 'arr suite but one BT client and PiHole should not be a problem. Provided you don’t seed hundreds of torrents, but even that may work out ok-ish depending on the BT client – some of them like Transmission or rTorrent are more efficient than qBitTorrent or Deluge.
Edit: oh and distro, any distro provided you disable unnecessary services. And I’m assuming you plan to use it in CLI mode only.
Thanks! Yes that’s the idea.
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.
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.
