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?
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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
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
Thanks. I might simply go for the raspberry pi solution as well.
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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.
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)
I’m sorry but why would you do this
Novelty only.
Keeping real fish is tedious and time consuming.
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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 !
I wouldn’t dare to charge that old battery up. Some of them can start a fire.
Thanks, it’s removable
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!
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.
Go for a vintage correct OS for a challenge, try Haiku!
Hey, Haiku is a “modern” OS too :)
Hannah Montana Linux
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 €0.20 per kWh you’re looking at a minimum operating cost of €113.88 a year.
You didn’t factor in that days have 24 hours, not one hour.
Woops. You are correct.
11 years? Nevermind use the laptop for sure haha
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; it’ll 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
dietPi is in fact Debian, with extra scripts to install/remove software. They also thinned it way down, so you get a working system with the bare essentials.
Would it be worth switching if I’m already set up on Debian?
If you’re all set up on Debian, I don’t see the advantage of switching to another flavor of Debian, unless you have a low powered machine (low specs, not much RAM).
Then I’ll conseder it when I’m feeling productive. I am using an old netbook. Thanks for the answers.
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.
you can probably even host your firewall in it
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
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.
