A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Just found this in a box and according to some Googling, its TPD is 6.8w!!! Got Debian on there with LXDE but I don't need another laptop. The big drawback is that it has a 32bit processor. It has a 100mbit network port, USB2.0, 2gb RAM and WiFi which isn't working but is listed in ip -a
I've used it to add wireless capabilities to my ancient Brother laser printer but it was extremely slow ( 15 mins before a text page started printing, PER PAGE)
BTW I'm pretty sure you can get the WiFi working.
And for most use case you'll want to get rid of the GUI. In Debian's case, best to reinstall the so-called minimal or netinst image.
that's a great idea re: music. i use a ton of Chromecast audios and, when Google "forgot to update the certs" I was SOL
+1 re WiFi. As I recall, with older laptops you may have to dig around to find some WiFi drivers for Debian — but they're most likely there, just not in the default repo.
In addition this was back when airlines had strong restrictions on wireless being used on planes, so many devices had physical switches to turn WiFi/Bluetooth off. Maybe it's still turned off
I'd completely forgotten about those. Can we bring back "the right to air gap"?
Can confirm. A lot of the old wifi drivers are missing from Debian 32 bit and OP will have to dig those up. I have an ancient Dell, 32 bit laptop I use when I am reading before bedtime. It didn't have to be anything super nice, as I just read on that laptop. I installed Debian 32 bit, but the drivers were not available, and being as it was just barely a viable laptop that I'm trying to squeeze the last drops of usefulness out of it, I didn't bother trying to find drivers. I dropped back and installed MX Linux. So, yeah, OP might need to do a little leg work.
I recommend MPD and a cli frontend like ncmpcpp (horrible name, good software).
Backup server
this is the most responsible idea. i love it
Beware that you won't have ECC, so corruption is much more likely than with proper hardware.
Is that an issue when using Borg for backups? Doesn't it checksum everything at each operation?
What about a trip into the smol-web? Perhaps a Gopher or Gemini Server? A IRC Bouncer? Or enter the fascinating world of telnet BBS systems!
I have a netbook from 2011 and I use it as Pi-hole and Jellyfin. You can add a backup system as well. Just go with headless Debian, you'll need every bit of CPU. Then you can just ssh into it and do everything like that.
A 100Mb connection is not that bad IMO. Lots of people doesn't have a much better uplink speed.
I loved the eee series!
the eeepeeeceee
oi mayte look its gott the wii fii and the ram and everything!!!!!!!!!!!
I thought it was just the lads in my flat that called them eeeeeeeeeeeepeecees!
The n280 is specifically limited since it's 32-bit, but low powered machines can be useful regardless. Two of the servers in my empire of dirt are atom d2550s, and I'm even able to run proxmox on them (since that model is 64-bit), but in terms of bare metal, they were able to run Matrix conduit, ejabbered, a nostr relay, and for a while my searx and yacy instances. (Though as I recall the cpus lack of instructions eventually stopped me from running searx on that hardware) I think I was even able to run invidious.
If it's just for you, it would surprise you how much you can do with a very small amount of CPU power.
Another thing that a machine like that might be useful for is a jump box. You can just put a very light distribution on it, and make it accessible to the outside world and one way or the other (secured of course) so you can hop into it if you need to do any remote administration.
The one thing that I found when I was using stuff that was particularly low powered is drive latency matters a lot. If you are using an SSD for storage, even much faster processors end up spending a lot of time sitting there waiting for the spinning hard drive to get to where it needs to be so you can be a lot more efficient with less CPU power.
Seedbox, tor bridge, i2pd node, pihole, wireguard...there are a lot of things you can run.
Maybe AdGuard Home would be cool. Its a modern way to block ads via DNS (like PiHole, just newer)
Web server