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
    132·
    9 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
        2·
        9 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

  • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    6·
    9 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.

  • L3ft_F13ld!@links.hackliberty.orgEnglish
    5·
    9 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.

  • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    9 months ago

    Puppy Linux!

    Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Gentoo, Peppermint…

    Some others like damn small linux or nano Linux or Linux lite.

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    I don’t know about the whole 'arr suite but one BT client and PiHole should not be a problem. Provided you don’t seed hundreds of torrents, but even that may work out ok-ish depending on the BT client – some of them like Transmission or rTorrent are more efficient than qBitTorrent or Deluge.

    Edit: oh and distro, any distro provided you disable unnecessary services. And I’m assuming you plan to use it in CLI mode only.

  • juli@programming.devEnglish
    31·
    9 months ago

    Any distro. Energy consumption may be higher. Apart from that all good (I guess)

      • joenforcer@midwest.socialEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        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.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    1·
    8 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

    2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

    [Thread #390 for this sub, first seen 31st Dec 2023, 16:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    9 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.

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

    Edit: I did manage to install Puppy Linux onto it, but I was severely limited by the CPU which is 32bits. I’m trying another old laptop next! Thanks everyone!