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?

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.itEnglish
    352·
    11 months ago

    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

    • Leax@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      10·
      11 months ago

      That’s good to know ha ha! At least I can have some fun before investing further…

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        41·
        11 months ago

        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

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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!

  • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    25·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    11 months ago

    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)

  • L3ft_F13ld!@links.hackliberty.orgEnglish
    7·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    5·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • Ookami38@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • loganb@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • accidentalloris@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    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.