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?

  • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    10 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.

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.itEnglish
    1·
    10 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

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        01·
        10 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

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    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]

  • Lazz45@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    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

      • Lazz45@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        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

        • Leax@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          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.