Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

fosslinux.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 135 posts

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#31

Post by pansa2 »

What’s a good small laptop that’ll run a recent Linux distro? I’d like to get one to have an ultra-portable machine for doing lightweight development work - I don’t need much more than a text editor and a C compiler.

Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#32

Post by Borg3 »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #30

I had a similar experience trying to use an old laptop with 2GB of RAM. I was surprised how much it struggled with basic tasks. I remember my first computer with 32MB of RAM. Obviously we live in a different world now but still, it's not like I was trying to do anything more ambitious than what I used to do on that PC.

Its a pathetic world.. and sad.. I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory commit is 370MB.. If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling, I really get shivers... WTF?! How is that even possible? Bloat is astronomical and yet.. Most people just does NOT care...

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#33

Post by forinti »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #28

The reason this advice is bizarre is that old memory isn't actually that dear. The machines that would have had 2GB of RAM or less would be from the Core 2 Duo era or so, taking DDR2 or DDR3, and typically supported 8-16GB. 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10 and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile, so who is going to suffer <2GB instead of 8GB over $10?

Intel mobile chipsets for Core 2 Duo only supported 2 or 4GB. And not all the desktop chipsets supported 8 or 16GB. I have a laptop with 3GB: one of the slots only supports 1GB.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#34

Post by alaudet »

You don't even have to go that old. There are so many companies that upgrade tiny pc's its created a whole self hosting community with the tiny lenovo, hp and dell unit's. It's not only Windows that can be replaced with old hardware but also many online services with proxmox for cloud/nas/dns/vpn/multimedia etc. Of course these are not 2GB systems but you can do some pretty cool things with 8 and 9 year old systems that are literally decommissioned because they are too old. Although a friend of mine who works for a MSP gave me a Lenovo m710q tiny a month ago and its made a pretty good Debian Desktop for my workbench in the garage. I lucked out there because even these tiny's are now going up in price. People have caught on.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#35

Post by unleaded »

pansa2 wrote: post #31

What’s a good small laptop that’ll run a recent Linux distro? I’d like to get one to have an ultra-portable machine for doing lightweight development work - I don’t need much more than a text editor and a C compiler. Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?

old thinkpad X series is a good place to look

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#37

Post by skydhash »

pansa2 wrote: post #31

What’s a good small laptop that’ll run a recent Linux distro? I’d like to get one to have an ultra-portable machine for doing lightweight development work - I don’t need much more than a text editor and a C compiler. Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?

You’ll need to look at chromebook that can have a linux distro on it. I like the a good keyboard width so 14 inch laptop are my sweet spot. I have a latitude 7490 (which I wouldn’t recommend as it have an hardware design flaw ( it freeze when held one handed)) and it’s light.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#38

Post by tviertamo »

Great post. I just revived an old PC as well that was gathering dust by installing Linux on it. Also upgraded the hardware from a i3-6100 using iGPU + 8GB RAM to:

- i5-6600K (€20 used)

- ASUS STRIX RX 480 8GB (€20 used)

- 16GB DDR4 (€50 used)

€90 all in for an incredible Linux machine that still runs games great at 1080p. Probably even that amount of RAM was overkill, but it's 3200Mhz instead of the old 2133Mhz.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#39

Post by johnvaluk »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #28

The reason this advice is bizarre is that old memory isn't actually that dear. The machines that would have had 2GB of RAM or less would be from the Core 2 Duo era or so, taking DDR2 or DDR3, and typically supported 8-16GB. 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10 and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile, so who is going to suffer <2GB instead of 8GB over $10?

There are a lot of old Chromebooks with only 2GB of RAM soldered to the motherboard. Other than that, they're surprisingly capable machines after you flash them with MrChromebox firmware.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#40

Post by anthk »

Slackware and Hyperbola GNU/Linux still run fast. Just pick XFCE instead of KDE under Slackware.

Deselect KDE if you don't need it. If the machine is old, it's better to use XFCE and install the rest later.

If you install and setup slapt-get you might install some nice KDE/Plasma software later to run under KDE. Then you can set the QT5 theme to GTK2 under /etc/profile.d/qt.sh (chmod +x it) and this content:

        export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2
Slackware is not 100% free but you can compile a libre kernel from FSFLA with ease and drop it into the UEFI partition or /boot and run the required grub/lilo/elilo command later.
Post reply on HN