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
    25·
    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
    24·
    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

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        41·
        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

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      10 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!

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    5·
    10 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.

  • L3ft_F13ld!@links.hackliberty.orgEnglish
    5·
    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.

  • Ookami38@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    10 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·
    10 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·
    10 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·
    10 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.

  • Lazz45@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    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
        2·
        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.