

Ask HN: What to do with a spare laptop? - vdibart

I'm sure this has been asked a million times but I can only scroll back so far : )<p>I have a 2 or 3 year old IBM Thinkpad with Windows on it that I don't really use because I have both a desktop and a work-issued laptop, both with Windows.  I was thinking of installing Linux on it, but don't have a ton of time to waste down the rabbit hole of drivers, etc.  Any suggestions for what I should do with it?  Install Linux?  If so, which distro?  Do something else with it?  Your suggestions are greatly appreciated.
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yan
If you already have a workable computer, give it to a relative who needs one,
or sell it. No need to stock up on hardware other people can find useful.

You can also keep it as a spare, but that's wasteful. Computers are a
commodity.

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fsniper
I'm using my old celeron 1.5GHz laptop as a linux server for my company. It
runs dhcpd, bind for the network, apache, mysql, postgresql, tomcat for
development purposes, zoneminder for a camera (not in use anymore), in all
their respective openvz containers. And it's doing pretty well with a cooler.
Before the cooler it was hot as hell. Just only once, I put my lucene indexer
in ab infinite loop that i had not figured out before it shut self down with
it's acpi cpu protection rules :). So if you're in need of a simple server try
it.

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tug61granpa
I'm a neewbie to computing, old[63], on minimum wage , and not tech-savvy at
all. However I've managed to install Mint Linux on 2 elderly pc's and Ubuntu
on an early Asus eee. All can be downloaded for free quite quickly and easily.
An installation disc for Mint costs £3.99 in the UK. After XP Linux is a joy
to use, go on, have a go.

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sshconnection
I just finished installing Karmic Koala on an old D610. A while ago, I went
ahead and slapped 2 gigs of ram in it, up from the like 512 it came with, and
under Karmic this thing runs like a champ. Give it a try, it breathed new life
into my old clunker.

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ErrantX
War driving and wireless sniffing - even decrypt some networks (with
permission). And more..

A security distro like Backtrack will give you hours of random fun playing
with all the tools.

Something a bit different anyway.

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javanix
Put linux on it. The "rabbit hole of drivers" doesn't really exist any longer,
and a passing familiarity with linux can really be a useful skill to have.

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vdibart
That's good to hear. Linux doesn't scare me at all. It's Linux on a laptop
that scares me. I'm a command line kind of guy, but not a hardware kind of
guy. I just want to spend time being productive, not chasing down info in
forums. Last time I had Linux on a laptop (a long time ago) it took literally
a PhD to help me get it done.

~~~
CyberFonic
If you want command line, then you can edit the /etc/rc* files to startup into
a full-screen terminal if you like. There's nothing that says you must run
Gnome/KDE/etc.

Karmic Koala Beta runs on virtually everything I've tried it on with no driver
problems, even wierd built-in webcams on notebooks.

If you want to go really minimal, then you could run Debian (upon which Ubuntu
is based). I have a Compaq Armada running Debian without problems.

