I tried with a Celeron 1 GHz. It was slower than a rpi and it sucked 65 watts at idle π
But at least can give some experience, I prefer playing the sysadmin with real hardware than a VM
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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That's good to know ha ha! At least I can have some fun before investing further...
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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!
Itβs doable but you should treat it more as a learning opportunity than a production system. Honestly, thatβs 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. Itβs going to be interesting.
Found the spec sheet on that processor for anyone whoβs interested.
Thanks! I haven't thought of the 32 bit issue... I might give it a try anyway for the experience!
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)
Iβm 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
I wouldn't dare to charge that old battery up. Some of them can start a fire.
Thanks, it's removable
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 !
DietPi (it runs on PCs)
What advantages would this give over plain Debian or similar? I'm a total noob, so I'd love something that might help me get a little more out of my little netbook 'server'.
Check out their website; itβll do a better job of explaining than I can/will.
Thanks, I'll check it out.
It's a great OS. Ran it for a long time
You'll probably save money in the long run using a pi.
I did the math:
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 β¬0.20 per kWh you're looking at a minimum operating cost of β¬113.88 a year.
You didn't factor in that days have 24 hours, not one hour.
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11 years? Nevermind use the laptop for sure haha
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.
I started out self hosting on a laptop maybe a little newer than yours. Pentium, 2gb RAM. I'm happier with my pi, but it's more than enough to get started on. Pretty sure pi-hole will run no problem, the others my struggle a little bit depending on your disk speed.
Your cpu will be a pretty limiting factor, but upgrading the RAM and putting in an SSD could boost the performance quite a bit.
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.
Maybe. You limiting factor is going to be power and thermals. I started on a broken laptop and moved to a minipc when I first started.
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.
No
you can probably even host your firewall in it
Go for a vintage correct OS for a challenge, try Haiku!
Hey, Haiku is a "modern" OS too :)
Hannah Montana Linux
Puppy Linux!
Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Gentoo, Peppermint...
Some others like damn small linux or nano Linux or Linux lite.
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
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.
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It sounds too slow. Save yourself time and sanity.
Any distro. Energy consumption may be higher. Apart from that all good (I guess)
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.
[Thread #390 for this sub, first seen 31st Dec 2023, 16:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
No, just get a raspberry pi instead
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