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Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

Off-Topic discussions about science, technology, and non Debian specific topics.
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debiman
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#21 Post by debiman »

my server is a 10 year old laptop running debian, yay! put a 1TB drive into it so it can continue to serve files for a long while yet.
my desktop is NOT a laptop, and I had to replace the mobo 2 years back, and the processor and RAM with it (which makes it fairly new in my book), but the hard drives are fiendishly old. and the case... let's not talk about its ugliness, it's hidden under the table.

arzgi
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#22 Post by arzgi »

Lysander wrote:

You may want to try qmplay2 to watch Youtube videos on your NC10. This is a dedicated client which dispenses with the need to watch videos in your browser. This is not in the main repos but Steve added it to his:

https://software.opensuse.org/download. ... ge=qmplay2

Original thread:

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=127574
Last time I was about 2 years ago so bored, that could not think anything else to do, so I opened youtube app in my phone :shock:

But I must admit there are also very useful youtube videos, for example one solved the white sceeen problem of this NC10, and another howto reset page counter of my brother printer.

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acewiza
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#23 Post by acewiza »

An 8-year-old HP DV7 has been the Snort machine, monitoring my home LAN 100Mb cable modem link 24/7 for the past 3 years. It's on it's 3rd battery and will run on the power supply alone when that gives up the ghost. Should be interesting to see how long it will last in this role, but I wouldn't try using it for anything else at this point.
Nobody would ever ask questions If everyone possessed encyclopedic knowledge of the man pages.

Mikelos
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#24 Post by Mikelos »

Debian Stretch with Xfce on Lenovo ThinkPad X200s. This is just marvelous. I bought a new 9-cell battery for this laptop and now it takes pretty long time to discharge. I was inspired by Dr. Richard Stallman. He uses a different model of ThinkPad, but also the old one.

emariz
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#25 Post by emariz »

My work terminal is a 2011 Sony Vaio with a Sandy Bridge i3 processor. It however was not 'resurrected' but only maintained by Debian, for it has always been running Debian since day one.

I added some RAM, replaced the battery last year and moved from a hard drive to an SSD, but the operating system has always been Debian (starting with Squeeze, which was used for as long as I could, and then Testing.) It runs so well that I have been constantly delaying the purchase of a new laptop. Hell!, I got a 2017 ThinkPad earlier this year and I have yet to migrate. This Vaio with Debian is awesome; no need to change.

In the past couple of years, some co-workers have expressed their interest in buying my laptop because they were surprised how long it has worked flawlessly. They have no idea what Linux is, but they do love the idea of never requiring a service or facing a system halt, and so on.

kevinthefixer
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#26 Post by kevinthefixer »

It was only a few years ago, maybe 5, that I retired my HP laptop from 1998. Can't remember the model now, I call it "the paver" because when closed it strongly resembles a gray cinderblock. About the same weight too. It had (still does, it's out in the storage shed somewhere) Puppy Linux on it, just about the only OS that ever made it useful. It lacks the horsepower to run Windows 98 well.

I still have a couple Atom-powered netbooks too, both shipped with Win7Starter (what a joke! Microsoft added code to the OS to prevent users changing the desktop wallpaper, just to encourage them to pony up for the upgrade). Both are currently running Debian Stretch with the Raspberry Pi desktop, which makes them useful computers, even more so than Puppy Linux. The RPi Foundation's devs took LXDE and modified it to run on the lightest hardware possible, even a Raspberry Pi. Then they ported it back to x86 architecture (RPi is ARMhf), and if you have an underpowered system it's the distro I recommend. After all it costs nothing to try it (or use it), it can even be run as live boot with persistence. You can do that with Puppy Linux also, IMHO Debian with RPi is better.

And my Nu2u toy is a Dell Latitude E4300, ca. 2010, core2duo @ 2.6GHz, 4GB RAM and Stretch-XFCE on a 240GB SSD. I prefer lighter DEs anyway and I like the XFCE utilities and such. But I've never before owned a full computer that will go from power-off to working desktop in under 20 seconds, only a Chromebook; this one will. It loads a full browser (Seamonkey) in roughly a second and a half also. It will edit audio with an editor designed to run on Win98, CoolEdit2000, under WINE. It will watch OTA TV with a Hauppage stick. It will do anything my big desktops will do except store terabytes of data, and I don't need all the data I've ever collected in my portables; most of it can stay at home until I need it. At this point I have roughly US$250 invested; for that money you can buy a Chromebook new. Sorry but I'm not impressed with the CBs, although now they can run Android apps, and I just read a CNET article that says they will soon be able to run Linux distros, including Debian. So I may dust mine off yet.

hairyelbows
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#27 Post by hairyelbows »

i use debian testing
many laptops, many for friends. nine I think
a 7 year old dell
a asus
two more which I cannot remember
many with nvidia which only works with 4.9 kernel or earlier.
two asus i5
a asus i7 converted to a 7inch by 9 inch by 2 inch desktop unit
Most of these were used by windows users who felt compelled to upgrade and cost me from $35 to $200.
the i7 was $90 because of a broken power socket which cost me $1
i put ssd in most
most of these are the homes media centre. the i3 with intel graphics plays blu-ray, anything less does not
all of them are used for internet.

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esp7
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#28 Post by esp7 »

Hallvor wrote:I own an ASUS Eee PC R101D - 10.1" - Atom N455 - 1 GB RAM - 320 GB HDD, running Debian Stretch and Trinity Desktop Environment. It was first installed with Debian Wheezy (testing) and LXDE a little more than five years ago.
I have as well one, eeepc 1000HE. I am working a lot in shitty remote areas and its my number 1 companion running on debian stable. But trust me, install an SSD and upgrade RAM to 2GB (should be the maximum). Your experience will be way more nice. The bottleneck however is the shitty atom cpu, but the machine itself is very solid and robust. Was indeed a good investment 6 years ago :D
ThinkPad X220: i5-2520M CPU 2.5GHz - 8GB RAM 1333 MHz - SSD 860 EVO 250GB - Debian - ME_cleaned
ThinkPad X230: i5-3320M CPU 3.3GHz - 8GB RAM 1600 MHz - SSD 860 EVO 500GB - Debian - ME_cleaned

Peppe
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#29 Post by Peppe »

Using a Thinkpad X220 as my main laptop - Debian Stretch with lxde and running with a 256gb ssd and 6gb ram.
Got the laptop last year on a very neat price, and I like the black finish and high quality build on the laptop.


If anyone want to run Debian on a laptop, I highly recommend Thinkpad and replacing the harddrive to a an ssd.
Simply love that you don't have to buy the latest to have a snappy fast laptop.
Running Debian Squeeze with xfce4 on a Fujitsu P7120 and a Asus ITX HTPC with Debian Squeeze with xfce4 . Debian just keeps getting better and better .

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Head_on_a_Stick
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#30 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

This X201 won't run Win10, that's for sure :mrgreen:

I prefer Alpine Linux because the musl libc base is noticeably lighter than the bloated GNU libc variant (as used by Debian) on this old dinosaur and OpenBSD's libc seems to work even better again.
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kevinthefixer
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#31 Post by kevinthefixer »

Haven't heard of Alpine before. Unfortunately I don't have time to play right now.

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Head_on_a_Stick
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#32 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

If you do find the time I have a webpage with some notes on using Alpine Linux for the desktop:

https://head-on-a-stick.github.io/

It really is Linux Done Right:)
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kevinthefixer
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#33 Post by kevinthefixer »

Bookmarked for its time. Right now I'm having too much fun with Stretch (and getting some work done too). Storm last week took out my main desktop, not just the power supply unfortunately although it tested bad, new one tests good but computer is still completely unresponsive. Lot of work to set up a mainframe with all the multimedia, samba and all, and as I'm sure you're well aware, most of the documentation is woefully out of date. Info can be found but it's not as simple as looking in the wiki. Thanks for the info!

n_hologram
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#34 Post by n_hologram »

I have a toy project based on minimal devuan, but I'm sure much of it would translate to debian minimal, too. It started rough but is mostly stable now. It's really just a bunch of under-the-hood tweaks to a minimal base, and is meant to be used with a simple window manager, like dwm or the boxes. The different configs and scripts accomplish the same tasks as other managers (wifi, power, etc) without the overhead of a GUI and with more flexibility for automation and customization.
https://github.com/souperdoupe/crunkbong
Head_on_a_Stick wrote:the musl libc base is noticeably lighter than the bloated GNU libc variant (as used by Debian)
noob question, but how are you measuring this?
bester69 wrote:There is nothing to install in linux, from time to time i go to google searching for something fresh to install in linux, but, there is nothing
the crunkbong project: scripts, operating system, the list goes on...

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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#35 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

I love that project, it is awesome :cool:
n_hologram wrote:
Head_on_a_Stick wrote:the musl libc base is noticeably lighter than the bloated GNU libc variant (as used by Debian)
noob question, but how are you measuring this?
I have a readout of the load average of the system over the last minute displaying in the status bar of my desktop:

Code: Select all

while sleep 1;do xsetroot -name "$(uptime|awk '{gsub(",","");print $9}')  •  $(apm|awk '/Battery/{print $4}')  •  $(date +'%F  •  %T')";done&
^ That's for OpenBSD, for Linux I awk /proc/loadavg directly.

I also like to check memory usage at a bare desktop and I think Alpine Linux holds the record at the moment (~32MiB used in a 64-bit system with 4GiB total RAM) but OpenBSD only uses slightly more memory with a slightly lower load average so... *shrugs*

EDIT: I would claim a subjective benefit in respect of how snappy the system feels but this is probably just my imagination:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Benchmarks ftw! :mrgreen:
deadbang

kevinthefixer
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#36 Post by kevinthefixer »

Head_on_a_Stick wrote: EDIT: I would claim a subjective benefit in respect of how snappy the system feels but this is probably just my imagination:
So long as you feel it's better, who else cares? One of the things I like about Linux, and open-source in general, is the right to suit yourself. I was going to say the ability, but that's up to you also, to aquire it or not. Sorry if I'm a bit off-topic. Oh, OK, not all that sorry.

Liamza2314
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#37 Post by Liamza2314 »

Me! Dell Inspiron 9400 with 2gb ram and 512mb vram running Debian 9 with mate is now a working computer! I use it for minecraft servers when my friends come over, as a client in a pinch, an apache server for my intranet, all kinds of stuff! Linux FTW!!

Proinsias
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#38 Post by Proinsias »

Apline has given my Acer Aspire 5715z a new lease of life, I was using it as my main system for a month or two.
It had been lying gathering dust for a few years as I couldn't get the fan working properly under linux, I gave up after a few failed attempts to install windows7/10/dosbox to update the bios.
Along came Alpine and the fan works perfectly, no idea why, alongside a much cleaner and lighter system. I have Debian as a glibc chroot, and Void, installed from within Alpine, which is nice. The system also runs pretty smooth on a 32gb flash drive in a usb 2 port.

tendouser
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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#39 Post by tendouser »

not old but still a laptop ASUS X540SA... running debian stretch... sometimes freezing.... but it's working pretty well!!!!!!!!

Cheers from Panamá!!!!!!!

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Re: Who is using old laptops, thanks to linux?

#40 Post by bw123 »

My latest is a 6930p, HP Elitebook it's about 8-10 yrs old? It was a decent upgrade for me. My eyes are getting old so the switch from a 10 inch to 14 is really nice, 2gb to 4gb ram. I put a cheap ssd in it. Pretty snazzy, and I got it for next to nothing from my reliable local hardware shop.

p.s. okay it's not -really- snazzy, it's built like a tank and has just about every hardware known to man in it.
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