Worth trying using a 15 years old notebook for self hosting?

Leax@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 74 points –

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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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.

Thanks! I haven't thought of the 32 bit issue... I might give it a try anyway for the experience!