
I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook - singuerinc
https://medium.com/@singuerinc/i-installed-coreos-in-9-years-old-macbook-3aec88489090#.djmramizx
======
andreiw
That "ugly white notebook" was one of the most usable laptops in its day, *nix
or windows, and it still isn't that ancient - computing innovation really has
slowed down significantly. Compare to notebooks from '96 and point out the
novelty of running a 64-bit OS on a 64-bit machine.

~~~
gh02t
I've got OpenBSD running on an old Dell Atom netbook that I use alongside my
desktop for keeping notes/task lists/music control etc. It's quite usable
apart from most browsers run like crap, which is impressive for a 6 year old
laptop on a processor that was considered underpowered even when it came out.

~~~
grubles
HP Mini (Intel Atom) with Gentoo here! With no X it sits pretty at 12MB RAM
usage. Now to figure out what daemons to run on it...

~~~
anonbanker
you mean _other_ than systemd? :)

~~~
grubles
What systemd?? OpenRC here. <:)

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jakobegger
This brings back memories of my first website. I hosted it on my white iBook
G3, and I used dyndns to get a free hostname for my dynamic IP. The website
was only accessible when I was at home, and plugged in (we had no Wifi yet).

It was pretty popular with my classmates for some time -- there was a self-
written forum on it where you could upload photos, and people used it to share
holiday pictures (this was before Facebook allowed everyone to share stuff
online)

Unfortunately at some point the HD crashed and I lost the database since I had
no backup of it -- I just didn't know where MySQL stored its files.

~~~
BogusIKnow
I feel so old, my first website run on a DEC Alpha.

~~~
kps
So did AltaVista, when it was good.

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NotOscarWilde
Good work! We have a black MacBook from the same era at our house; my
girlfriend uses Ubuntu on it as her main computer. Should have thought about
blogging about it!

That 32-bit EFI with 64-bit CPU is a real curse for installing recent Linux
(although Ubuntu did release "amd64+mac" ISO images for these computers, I
think even 14.04 is available this way).

Additionally, my internal DVD drive for this MacBook failed, so I had to use
an external DVD drive for booting said Ubuntu. It had the weirdest bug -- you
had to reboot from rEFInd three times for the EFI boot to recognize that the
external DVD drive has a bootable DVD in it. First time, it won't see it,
second time, it won't see it, and on the third reboot, it magically does.

The reason is likely because the drive spins up too slow and the EFI boot
timeouts unless the drive is powered up from an earlier spinup.

Besides the internal drive failing, the machine with Ubuntu on it is perfectly
usable as a main laptop for a student. It shows how the laptop scene did not
improve that much in the last 9 years -- and that one can save quite a bit of
money if he buys a reliable machine and treats it well.

~~~
kiddico
Bugs like that are always so satisfying to figure out. It's confusing for so
long, you get frustrated, move on, then later you see a slight correlation and
a light bulb goes off in your head.

I love it. I had one of those experiences a few weeks ago with ,of all things,
a desk. Turns out you gotta open the drawers in a certain series. Or
alternatively rip out the tabs that create said series. The second is a lot
more fun.

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jggonz
This reminds me of some of my early linux boxes. As a poor high school student
in the mid to late 90s I was only able to get free computer equipment. Some of
it was pretty cool. In order to squeeze as much performance out of them, I ran
slackware and debian.

Some of the most memorable were:

386DX AT&T Server tower (a huge case with a 40lb 1.2GB Hard drive) - got it to
run slackware and serve files on a 10mbps network

486SX-40MHz desktop machine running linux with FVWM and Englightenment! :)
Biggest achievement: Play a 128mbps Mp3 file streamed from an Apple LC475!

Apple LC475 (68040-25MHz) - The 68040 could decode an mp3 file. I used to use
it to decode the MP3 files and send the audio over the network to a 486sx that
lacked an FPU. I ran linux on this, not mac os.

Apple Quadra 660AV - awesome little machine. I ran linux and mac os on this.

Those were fun times!

~~~
Joeri
My favorite linux machine was a 486 laptop with a 450mb hd and 20 mb ram which
originally came with windows 95 running at 640x480, which I got handed down
from my dad around 2000.

I bootstrapped a barebones debian system, custom-compiled basically everything
on my (debian) desktop and copied it over, stripping out as much as I could,
and ended up getting a pretty decent X environment going on it, with opera as
browser and fvwm as window manager. I programmed my first web app on that
machine, in C++. It didn't even run all that slowly, one wonders what went
wrong that modern software is so horribly slow. Good times though, fun
machine.

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jonathonf
Lesson one: Use a DVD-RW instead of a DVD-R. Lesson two: Use a USB flash drive
instead of optical media.

The 32-bit EFI vs 64-bit system issue has reared its head again with some
Windows 8 tablets (e.g. HP Stream 7). Switching the iso's EFI boot files is an
easy way to solve this.

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dbalan
Very useful idea. One thing I want to add is docker daemon and client
communicate over tcp. So in any computer, you can just export DOCKER_HOST and
use it to manage containers and get a more native feel.

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bobajeff
I've been learning docker on an old 64bit IBM designed for XP using the a
newish version of lubuntu.

There are still some things that make it unintuitive and in my view incomplete
(eg. a command to copy/cut/paste/delete volumes).

A couple things I've found out: You should definitely use the Overlay FS
driver as soon as possible; don't use DeviceMapper. Also, It can be convenient
to use data volume containers but watch out for orphaned files in
/var/lib/docker/tmp and always use -v.

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pavement
2006 era hardware [1] is actually still pretty relevant and current, in terms
of the standards and features available on the motherboard and hard disk, so
it's not surprising that this software works.

Once you go back as far as a machine that only provides PATA/IDE hard drive
connectors, that's when I would expect to start seeing problems emerge.

[1]
[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1956385](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1956385)

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zlatan_todoric
I installed on even older MacBook Debian Unstable (with part from
experimental), Plasma 5 environment (gnome doesn't work because old Intel card
supports only to OpenGL 2.1) without any problems and even full fledged KWin.
Installation process was: copy netinstall image to usb, sync it, plug usb into
macbook and install Debian. Everything works without any problem.

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emptyflask
I'm running OSX Yosemite on a 2006 Mac Pro 1,1. It wasn't too difficult once I
had the correct boot.efi, and it works flawlessly. With an SSD, a minor CPU
upgrade, and a recent video card it's nearly as fast as a 2013 Macbook Pro.

I'm thinking of switching it over to Linux though, I'm no longer happy with
the direction in which Apple is headed, and I do nearly everything in the
terminal and browser anyway.

~~~
anonbanker
If you do switch, look for a KDE-based distribution like Kubuntu or Antergos.
you'll thank me later.

~~~
emptyflask
I should give KDE another chance. Last time I tried it was like a decade ago.

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guylepage3
Awesome article. I have been thinking about setting up a RPi as a server
lately as well. Do you know if RancherOS will run on the Pi2?

~~~
miah_
Check out TinyCore instead, its a modular Linux distribution. You can end up
with ~15mb Images.

"The Core Project is a highly modular based system with community build
extensions.

It starts with a recent Linux kernel, vmlinuz, and our root filesystem and
start-up scripts packaged with a basic set of kernel modules in core.gz. Core
(10MB) is simply the kernel + core.gz - this is the foundation for user
created desktops, servers, or appliances. TinyCore is Core + Xvesa.tcz +
Xprogs.tcz + aterm.tcz + fltk-1.3.tcz + flwm.tcz + wbar.tcz

TinyCore becomes simply an example of what the Core Project can produce, an
15MB FLTK/FLWM desktop. "

[http://www.tinycorelinux.net/arm.html](http://www.tinycorelinux.net/arm.html)

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vladsanchez
I wish I still own my PowerBook17 to install CoreOS too. Like the author, I
installed almost every distro until I settled on Ubuntu, but it was not
enough. Inspiring article! Thanks for sharing.

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contingencies
FWIW, I have an old Macbook Pro of the 2009 era. I ripped the DVD drive out
and replaced the hard disk with 2xRAID1 SSDs. It runs Gentoo. Fast.

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wmat
I have Debian on a 2001 G3 iBook. Works great.

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jtwebman
Hmm time to try this with my old laptop.

