squeezing a little bit more out of old hardware

nbittech · #1 December 9th, 2012, 08:49

I posted a thread on the desktop/other-wm section about light desktops for old laptops.

To make a long story short, old and cheap laptops are everywhere, those old p3, p4, and socket A laptops are everywhere, and they make fun toys.

FreeBSD supports this old hardware very well (better than linux in most cases,) and is quite useful in bringing the ubiquitous "old laptop that you were going to throw away but just couldn't" back to life.

Just so you know, I'm talking p3, p4, and socket A laptops here, 256-512mb or RAM max, 20gb-40gb hard drives max, no sse3, and really bad video (S3, r128, old intel, etc.)

Remember the really cool Fluxbox with the really cool conky.cfg that you had back in the day? Or the, "wait, what is that? The wallpaper is really cool though" desktop?

How do we get this old stuff to work again? -Os, Fluxbox, and a really slick, stripped-down kernel? Do I just set cputype and go? Or maybe packages are the best way?
SysCtl stuff? Tuning of some randome file?

People with old laptops on their desk, let's save these things from the trash!

How do we get some speed and usefulness out of these things?

I always thought personally, that a really stripped down kernel, set cputype in make.conf, and maybe something light, like fluxbox, openbox, or windowmaker, was the way to go. But can a 500mhz athlon with 384mb of RAM handle LXDE? Possibly? What about KDE3, or is this just a bad road to go down, as it's just too old, and unusable now? Ideas?

nbittech · #2 December 9th, 2012, 09:05

How do you optimize for a desktop on 10+ year-old hardware?

Is it even possible? If it is, then lookout IPad, Android tablet, here comes the "I bought it on the street for $20 from some drunk guy" laptop!

What if you could have a laptop that makes you feel like it's still 2001 when you turn it on, but lets you know it's still 2012 once you use it for anything. Retro feel, modern performance?
Fun right?

Fluxbox with HTML5, wine, and Adobe-Flash. Old-school with new rules.

throAU · #3 December 9th, 2012, 12:08

There's only really a point if your time has no value.

I'm quite certain you can pick up Pentium 4 class machines with at least a gig of RAM up for essentally nothing these days, as many companies junk their machines after 3-5 years old.

Which puts you right around the end of the P4 era, start of the Core 2 era.

Beastie · #4 December 9th, 2012, 13:25

The machine I currently use as my main desktop is not much more powerful than yours.

I use fvwm as window manager but there are many other lightweight (both dynamic and tiling) WMs out there.
The heaviest desktop environment I've tried was Xfce but I wouldn't recommend it if you intend to open more than 1 additional application.

You can check these threads for lightweight minimalist applications you could use:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=13983
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=35308

drhowarddrfine · #5 December 9th, 2012, 15:16

The newest hardware I have is a Core2 duo. I still have two servers running Pentium III but I know they still have a wm on them with Firefox, OO and other stuff (but I've not used them in quite a while). All my hardware, about 10 boxes, is given to me by Windows users "upgrading" to the latest version. I've never had an issue installing FreeBSD on any of them.

Aside: It must be the economy cause I've not been given any systems in a few years and am on the brink of building an all new god-box running FreeBSD.

jb_fvwm2 · #6 December 9th, 2012, 15:34

Use a 4-port usb hub to 1...improve the keyboard; 2...enable a /dev/da0,, 3...enable wifi (might fail if the battery won't hold a charge... enable .svn on additional space on a thumbdrive so the machine can be updated; ...

Code:

mkdir -p /mnt/src
mkdir -p /mnt/obj
mkdir -p /mnt/portmaster-download
mkdir -p /mnt/ports

In the third case, the new mount command would be different

Code:

df # 8g 
mount -t ufs -o union /dev/da0 /usr
#mount -t ufs -o union /dev/da0 /usr/ports/packages  #third case
df # 40g
# (BTW this(these) method(s) enables deleting the /usr/ports on
the laptop, but maybe not the /usr/ports/packages; /usr/ports/distfiles...  (IOW
restoring the latter after deletion...) which frees up space.
svn up /usr/ports   # ports actually on thumbdrive

That's all from memory, chance I've forgotten some detail or something else to add to the topic...
I've found some /lang/ ports may not build on lower power machines, hence the third use case... add packages from the thumbdrive from an equivalent higher-power build box.

nbittech · #7 December 9th, 2012, 21:30

I was just excited about reusing hardware like this. I wanted for people to have some fun. I've even seen old laptops made into things like media-servers, web servers, and even little gaming toys with emulators and lots of ROMs.
I also thought it would be cool to "have your old laptop back" in a since, as you can run the same thing you ran 10 years ago, but with a modern version number.
I realize people don't have infinite amounts of time to play with junk. But for the ones that do...
Maybe we could have a contest? Post screenshots? "Pimp-my-p4 laptop!"
By the way, the SVN thing is really cool also, and way easier than I would have thought. When you have expendable hardware it's fun to try things that you normally wouldn't.

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