
Ask HN: What is your favorite low-end setup you've ever done? - mod50ack
I really like to see what the most modern&#x2F;productive setup is that you can run on a piece of hardware. My favorites include a NetBSD desktop with current software I ran on a ca. 2000 mid-range desktop a few years back, or, even more delightfully hacky due to ppc32, a debian-ports system I&#x27;ve got running now on a PowerBook G4.
======
dTal
Of all my hilariously low-end setups, my favorite would have to be the Zipit
Z2. It's a little handheld instant-messaging toy with a qwerty keyboard, a
320x240 screen, and 32 megabytes of RAM. In 2011 or so, I didn't have a laptop
or much money, and I ended up using one of these as my daily driver. In those
days, 32 megabytes would run stock Debian. X11 was practically useless on a
device with no mouse, but all the curses programs worked. I had pretty good
eyes, so I loaded a 4x6 console font and got myself a ( _tiny_ ) 80 column
terminal. Elinks was a mite heavy for the thing and also has a tendency to
lock up when a page is slow, but I discovered an obscure console browser
called 'retawq' that would support my 100-tabs-a-day habit, even in such a
constrained environment. I even compiled it on the device. mplayer ran
perfectly well, and the audio chip in it was actually absurdly good especially
for an IM toy, so it was actually quite a practical mp3/FLAC player as well,
at a time when a portable FLAC player would run you about £200 if you could
find one at all. Disk space was limited only by the miniSD card you put in it.

They aren't quite so much fun any more, sadly, as Debian no longer runs
properly on 32 megabytes of RAM.

~~~
bonyt
I had the original ZipIt, it didn’t have a color screen and it’s specs were
even lower. It could still run text based Linux, with an ssh client, and it
could play mp3s, but only with one optimized piece of software. I used it to
go on IRC, and even wrote some very basic games that used ncurses or the
framebuffer.

[https://elinux.org/ZipIt](https://elinux.org/ZipIt)

------
jdabney
I worked a computer store back in the mid 2000s. We got an iMac in that had a
busted CRT and the owner just wanted the data moved to a new machine and then
gave us the old one to get rid of. I pulled it apart and installed Linux on
the 233 Mhz PowerPC. It ran for years with just the power board and
motherboard sitting open on my desk. I used it for a server and development
environment through ssh. I finally turned it off and I recently pulled it out
of the box and the PRAM battery had exploded and ruined the entire thing. Good
memories though.

------
marttt
I used a IPS-screened Thinkpad T42 (1.5 GB RAM, compact flash card in place of
HDD) + RAM-booted Tiny Core Linux + Non DAW for producing radio shows for my
country's public broadcasting. The T42's sound card didn't work, so a Zoom H1
recorder was used daily as an audio interface. I even used that machine to
record something important outdoors with an Avid Mbox 2, but I remember
feeling really uneasy as to how well this would work out.

I liked the T42 a lot (I still have it). All in all, I guess it is time for HN
to re-discuss Joey Hess' minimal setup:

[https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/](https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721645)

[https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/](https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/)

Or Jason Rohrer:

[https://usesthis.com/interviews/jason.rohrer/](https://usesthis.com/interviews/jason.rohrer/)

[http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-
rohrer/simpleLife.ht...](http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-
rohrer/simpleLife.html)

~~~
rcarmo
I had no idea Non, existed, thanks!

~~~
marttt
It was a fascinating find for me as well. Great example of modular design.

------
quaintdev
I have setup a self hosted note server[0] on Raspberry PI. Here's my workflow:

\- Remembered a todo or note? Type note in your browser address bar with
keyword 'pin' prefixed

    
    
        pin todo!pay the rent
        pin grocery!handwash
        pin watchlist!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j800SVeiS5I
    

\- Note gets saved in markdown document like todo.md, grocery.md and
watchlist.md. 'pin' is the keyword I have configured for my Pi server and
browser thinks its a search engine.

\- A http shortcut on Android when clicked shows a dialog box with todo.md
contents.

\- Edit/View notes using mapped network drive in your favorite markdown editor
both on desktop/mobile. You can also view all the notes in your browser.

[0]:
[https://github.com/quaintdev/pinotes](https://github.com/quaintdev/pinotes)

~~~
hobos_delight
As someone who is constantly (it seems) looking for new ways to take notes /
todos this is a very cool solution.

Using a get request to write the one-line notes is really nice - though do you
handle any sort of auth with this? Can FF be configured to handle that with
the shortcuts?

I love the idea of running this at home and being able to access it from
anywhere - and it being a simple webpage.

Edit: I just took a look at the source and no, no auth - though for home-
network constrained things this could still be cool.

I like the novel approach to it :)

~~~
quaintdev
Thanks for the feedback! I intend to add support for multi user so that may
require some sort of auth. I haven't got around to how I am going to implement
it though.

------
occamschainsaw
In high school, I made a Jarvis like voice automation system with a friend.
This was 2010, before Siri and AWS and home automation were cool. The whole
system was made out of junk parts. An ancient desktop with a parallel port was
the brain. The parallel port pins were connected to relays which were driving
the mains current to various appliances. We used the hilariously bad Windows
speech recognition to manipulate some cmd scripts which turned the parallel
pins on and off. As stupid teenagers, we had open mains lines on the floor. I
am happy to be alive.

~~~
alibarber
My 'lightbulb' (pun intended) moment as a kid for getting in to CS was when my
dad fished an old (something - it ran DOS, but not windows, and came with the
Turbo C Bible) PC out of the skip at work and wired up some 12V filament bulbs
to the parallel port - and by writing bytes out to it you could make them
flash in pretty patterns.

Later I also did the mains relay thing too - but I put them in a metal box.
Safety first ;)

------
chewxy
The most extreme was a Nokia E66 with PuTTy. I was on a flight for a holiday
and then the real time bidding system we had running was erroring out. I knew
where the bug was (proper fix was a TODO), and I had to fix the service before
boarding. nano with a T9 input typing Python is something I will never want to
do ever again.

Oh yeah, editing code on a live server. Also probably never again.

------
watersb
My all-time favorite (so far) was running our company email server on a Mac
SE/30\. Although that might not qualify as low-end, it was a machine our
department got at no charge when the donor upgraded. Good times, an elegant
weapon for a more civilized age.

I currently use an HP Stream 11 Pro that I got for not quite $100. I was going
to run Linux on it, but the trackpad was unusable for me without lots of
tuning of low-level parameters. It is usable as a dev box for static HTML
sites, using VS Code on Windows 10, even non-GUI WSL2 Linux basics. 4GB of
RAM, 6 Watts of heat.

Windows is a huge amount of work for me, but learning PowerShell or Python
doesn't require a ThreadRipper. Or 1080p video.

~~~
mhenr18
I bought a new HP Stream recently and it's been delightful to run Lubuntu on -
everything worked out of the box. Even two finger scrolling in Firefox with
the trackpad.

I have other machines that I use for my day job, but it's such a fun little
computer to use.

------
sjmulder
I regularly use an EEE PC (901, I think?) when I don't want to deprive my wife
of the MacBook. Runs Debian Linux with MATE just fine, only browsing is a bit
slow.

The programs I use are configured to have a minimum of toolbars and such to
save on screen space.

There's also a Pentium 4 PC that I've installed a time-appropriate stack on -
Windows 2000, Visual Studio 6, etc - to see if I was wrong to assert Wirth's
law. I wasn't, the thing flies.

~~~
serf
EEE PCs are cool. I had a bunch, and modified them all.

I wish that Asus had continued that line-up -- especially now with common
touch and high res small glass displays.

ultrabooks seem to have won, but I love 7-9 inch laptops as a form factor. The
typing takes some getting used to, but the size is such a nice convenience
factor.

------
tluyben2
I don't like carrying things when traveling, so I have tried different mobile
offices over the years which can definitely be considered low-end
practical/productive setups:

\- around 2005; HP Ipaq pocket pc + Zaurus C860 with network adapter; I did
all my document writing, programming, server admin, online buying/selling on
the combi of these two; very light to travel. Pretty perfect even for quite
long times on the road

The Zaurus I used until 2010 around; I still have it and it still works
perfectly.

\- around 2011; OpenPandora + iPhone, same setup as the above but more
powerful ; still as portable; on the Pandora I could/can do mostly anything I
need to do for work; php/ruby/c#.net/python/haskell/lua. The Pandora battery
can be swapped, so I carried 2 extras which means a week of work while
weighing absolutely nothing...

\- around 2018-now; GPD pocket 1 + iPhone and it's x86 while having _very_
good battery life with debian/i3wm, so same as above but with a lot more
freedom. It's far less repear-able though than the Pandora and the Pocket 2 is
really not as good (I sold it; it was annoying to work with compared).

------
rcarmo
Easily this:
[https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/05/23/2130](https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/05/23/2130)

Hacking a netbook into something I use daily has been more useful in the
current context than all my Raspberry Pi hackery - last year I turned a 3A+
into a neat portable server, and that was a lot of fun, too:

[https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2019/08/22/2023](https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2019/08/22/2023)

...but ultimately less productive.

~~~
tinco
Netbooks were so great. I had an Asus EEEPC that first ran Windows 7 for a
while, then archlinux using a tiling window manager, and finally I installed
MacOSX on it and I actually held down a Ruby webdev job on that until I had
made enough money to buy the MacBook Pro 2009. I still have a picture
somewhere of the EEEPC transferring the OSX settings to the MacBook, it was
hilarious.

~~~
arprocter
It's a shame the only cheap, small laptops now all seem to be Chromebooks with
limited storage and very few ports on them

I still use my 1015PX EEE on a regular basis - the keyboard is flaky (dust
under the keys?) but it comes in handy to share network via Ethernet
connection to a something without WiFi

No USB 3 and only 2GB of RAM isn't great; although you can browse simple
websites reasonably well, and I was surprised streaming live YouTube content
in VLC works fine

~~~
tinco
Only 2GB of ram? I'm pretty sure my EEE (901) had at least 4GB. I bet you
could get that upgraded for less than $10 now.

edit: I think I'm wrong about this, a little googling shows that support for
4gb ram on atom n550 is dodgy at best. I don't remember taking a soldering
iron to it. I really did Ruby webdev on a machine with 2GB ram, crazy!

~~~
arprocter
Could be one of those situations where sometimes 4GB will work, but it
officially only supports 2?

The HP MicroServers are like that

------
SamReidHughes
This is kind of basic but I bought a Thinkpad W530 with maxed out specs, prior
life as a docking station queen, in a used Japanese bookstore (in San Diego)
last year for about $300 after I needed a 15" non-Mac laptop.

~~~
jlgaddis
A ThinkPad W530 I bought in 2013 is still my primary laptop. It's maxed out as
well, a 2.7 GHz quad-core, 32 GB of RAM, and a pair of Samsung SSDs in a
RAID1.

A couple of MBPs have came and went during this time, I've kept going back to
the W530. You got a great deal, though, I originally paid around $2300 for
mine!

------
karmakaze
I picked up programming as a hobby and was lucky to get a job making an
inventory system for a jewelry store in the mall using dBase II on a Xerox
CP/M machine. That was nice.

When my dad and uncle wanted an inventory system for their computer store in
the same mall, I thought I could make one from scratch on the Atari 8-bit. It
was written in BASIC with 6502 assembly routines. Things went pretty well but
disk (as in 5 1/4" floppy) access was slow and tried to fit the stock into
memory which didn't fit. Got a bank switching 128 KB memory extender (up from
the base 48K). It was fun writing the data compression, search, and sort
routines in assembly. The sort was a combination quick + merge sort because
bank switching meant that only 1+1 of N banks were addressable at a time. I
think it also disabled display DMA for a 30% speed boost during full sorting.
I'm also remembering it had a partial index that fit in main+bank0 memory for
searches. It did more than inventory, serving as the POS with receipt printer
and dot-matrix printed reports. That thing ran for years and years until Atari
started making PC clones and something else was used as 'business machine'
promotional demo.

------
darkr
A 33mhz 486 DX (8MB RAM, roughly 1990 vintage IIRC) was doing firewalling and
routing duties for my parents house from approx 2000 until ~2012.

~~~
cpach
Cool! What was the throughput and latency like?

------
pininja
Before Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology, and Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 were
rereleased on steam I held on to my first Windows XP computer dearly, a Dell
Dimension 4000 series PC and little VGA LCD from round 2007. Had to replace
the battery at least once.

These games aged very well and I miss the graphical simplicity of XP. I used
to edit movies on it in windows movie maker.

------
janci
My favourite was Casio PocketViewer PV-S660 I used during high school as
calculator, for note taking, learning programming and playing games. You could
not do much on 6MB flash and 160x160px monochrome display, but it was awesome
device for the time. On two AAA batteries it lasted for months of everyday use
(without backlight).

------
napolux
With a raspberry pi 3 I've done an app running on node, scraping some open
data, pushing those crunched data to a redis.

Then a cronjob will post that data to a website.

All on that machine.

For a while I've also used it as a minimal webdev environment with no real
performance problem.

~~~
biot
Does a 1.2 GHz 64-bit CPU with 1 GB of RAM really qualify as low end these
days?

~~~
tomjen3
No, it is a very low end machine.

Those specs would have been mainstream 15 years ago, when I had to replace my
first thinkpad in 2007 the Acer I brought had a GB of ram and that was a
budget machine. Worked very well after I upgraded the OS from Vista to XP.

~~~
beckingz
The Vista to XP 'upgrade' was such a good move.

------
29athrowaway
13 years ago, I used an old box with very low specs (Pentium MMX) as a home
network appliance using Linux.

It acted as a firewall, reverse proxy cache and if you used nmap on it, it
showed up as a network printer.

------
rejschaap
I ran Gentoo Linux on a 12" iBook PowerPC G4 for a while after Apple
officially declared it as end-of-life. I really loved the form factor at the
time, it feels clunky now.

------
arethuza
Does a Sun SparcStation 2 count? By today's standards it is pretty feeble (a
small percentage of the power of a Raspberry Pi) - but it sure didn't feel
that way at the time!

[http://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=266](http://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=266)

I occasionally think about trying to find one and installing NeWS & HyperNeWS
to see if it really was a nice as I remember.

------
jlgaddis
In the past, I've had some really low-end setups.

The most low-end things I have nowadays are a pair of Neoware CA21 thin
clients (VIA 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM, 512 MB flash storage) serving as DNS and NTP
servers.

Pretty much everything else runs on my VMware vSphere cluster but I keep those
going as the cluster needs functional DNS and NTP services when starting up
from scratch (chicken and egg problem).

------
jonathanstrange
In the 90s I installed FreeBSD on a Zip drive running on an old Powermac and
connected a MacPlus as terminal with a 6m long ethernet cable (Edit: or
another cable? no longer sure). I used it for experimenting with Unix and IRC.

However, for some reason the Zip drive was always trashing even though the
system wasn't swapping. But the setup worked.

------
nlvrhvn
Until three years ago I had been running an Aldi Pentium Pro 4 system from
1999 with windows 95, that I moved to various kind of Linux distributions
since 2010. The system has been running great but finally decided to buy
something modern... A Lenovo x220 from 2012 ;-) with a new SSD running windows
10 and Linux dual-boot.

------
pelasaco
My best low-end setup was a network gateway running FreeBSD for traffic
shapping and NAT. It was a Pentium pro II, out-of-the-shelf with 4 3COM Fast
Ethernet and used to provide internet for more than 2k simultaneous users. It
was the main server from an ISP where I used to give some consulting.

------
akeck
RPi Zero W, set up as an stand-alone wifi access point, running off a usb
battery pack. I used it with an ssh client on my phone for Python code and
writing while traveling.

Old Thinkpad with no battery just after ext3 with journaling came out. I would
yank the cord without shutting it down. Never lost data ;-)

------
spzb
I used to use a 486-33 as a router/firewall setup with Smoothwall (I think) as
the OS. This was probably about 2003 when ADSL was a new thing and there
weren't any affordable dedicated routers on the consumer market.

Also used to run a Hackintosh setup on a Samsung NC10 netbook.

------
bashinator
I had a Sun Sparc Classic with an s-bus quad fast ethernet card. Loaded
OpenBSD on it and ran it as my home gateway/router for a few years.

------
nknealk
Not super low end, but I used a Thinkpad X200 running xubuntu well into 2016.
Swapping in an SSD kept everything feeling fast enough

------
type0
AntixLinux on classic Thinkpads

------
easytiger
Solaris 9/ultra 10

------
lproven
• I had a client with a Novell IntraNetware 4.1 network. I did a bargain-
basement system upgrade for them. With a local system builder, we took a whole
storage closet full of decade-old 386 and 486 desktops and turned them into
Cyrix 6x86 166+ clients. The motherboards had integrated graphics and NICs
(rare back then), 32MB RAM and a smallish local EIDE hard disk, say 1.2GB. No
CD drives, original 14-15" SVGA CRTs.

A 2nd Novell server would have been too expensive, so I put in an old Pentium
133 workstation as a fileserver running Caldera OpenLinux with its built-in
MARSNWE Netware server emulation. It held CD images of NT 4 Workstation, the
latest Service Pack, the latest IE, MS Office 97 and a few other things like
printer drivers. Many gigs of stuff, which would have required a new hard disk
in the main server, which with Netware would have meant a mandatory RAM
upgrade -- Netware 3 & 4 kept disks' FATs in RAM, so the bigger the disk, the
more RAM the server needed.

On each client, I booted from floppy and installed DOS 6.22. Then I installed
the Netware client and copied the NT 4 installation files from the new server.
Ran WINNT.EXE and half an hour later it was an NT workstation. Install Office
etc. straight off the server. (An advantage of this was that client machines
could auto-install any extra bits they needed straight off the server.)

For the cost of one fancy Dell server & a NOS licence, I upgraded an entire
office to a fleet of fast new PCs. As a bonus, they had no local optical
drives for users to install naughty local apps.

• Several 486s with PCI USB cards, driving "Manta Ray" USB ADSL modems -- yes,
_modems_ \-- running Smoothwall, a dedicated Linux firewall distro.

[http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/36102/Alcatel-
Stingra...](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/36102/Alcatel-Stingray-
ADSL-Speed-Touch-USB-Modem/)

[https://www.smoothwall.org/](https://www.smoothwall.org/)

This was at the end of the 1990s, when 486s were long obsolete, but integrated
router/firewalls were still very expensive.

Smoothwall also ran a caching Squid proxy server, which really sped up access
for corporate users regularly accessing the same stuff. For instance, if all
the client machines ran the same version of Windows, say, Windows 2000 Pro,
then after the first ran Windows Update, all successive boxes downloaded the
updates from the Smoothwall box in seconds. Both far easier and _much_ cheaper
than MS Systems Management Server. (And bear in mind, at the turn of the
century, fast broadband was 1Mb/s. Most of my clients had 512kb/s.)

There was one really hostile, aggressive guy in the Smoothwall team, who
single-handedly drove away a lot of people, including me. The last such box I
put in ran IPCop instead. [http://www.ipcop.org/](http://www.ipcop.org/) After
that, though, routers became affordable and a lot easier.

