Summer is here and with that comes garage sales! I went looking around and found this beauty, for $10!!! When i went to go purchase it, the very nice 60ish year old man, Boldly said and proclaimed “it doesnt run windows, well it cant because it only has 2gb of ram. but its still a usable machine” So he then said the phrase that every nerd begs to hear, “do you know what linux is?” Me and this man talked for almost and hour about linux and the enshitfaction of windows. He did install antix a lightweight debian based distribution GNU/Linux/SystemDeeznuts distribution on it. and said he ran Antix on his main computer for daily use, I sadly did not ask what his main computer is :(. But i just thought it was so cool and sureal to meet a linux user at a garage sale, like you go to foss conventions and you expect to see some the the nerdiest people that have roamed this planet. But this guy was just so cool, i beckon all the time about windows is a inflated rotting corpse. although i still need it for fusion 360 sadly :(, it was really fun to talk another person so passionate about linux IRL.
but anyway enough blabbering about this totally rad Linux user,
he had a user account setup to auto login and user named antix which was also the sudo password. I have personally never used Antix but it has alot to offer for lower end computers, some light weight web browsing and some text editing. Obviously there were some thing you could not do or the computer struggled. Playing youtube was the quite the benchmark for this billet of a computer.
But i got quickly board with debian/Antix and i knew from the moment i saw this computer there was 1/2 things i wanted to do with it!
the first thing was install FreeBSD. I have always been intrigued by it, a UNIX like OS that was by design meant to replace UNIX and if were not for Linux may have been the windows alternative OS that linux is today. So i grabbed by CD burner and started burn’n!
the install went pretty smooth, minus a few small hiccups.
first off when it boots, it loads then goes to a blackscreen and stops displaying, i found another person with this computer and wanting to install FreeBSD on it on the FreeBSD forum. I had to punch in a few commands that made it TTY only, i then followed the Handbook and install intel’s video drivers. After that i have a fully functioning FreeBSD install!!!
Now for the Fun part
installing the window manager! and programs, after installing sway and enabling some system settings. everything clicked together and i had to see how much the CPU struggled with playing video from youtube to compare BSD vs linux .
The CPU works very hard for them frames!
All in all, its actually pretty usable. granted not for the average user, i often read hackaday and browse the web via links web browser. and i part of me likes it a little more than my 2020 E14 thinkpad, not spec wise but design wise. this computer is built thiccccccc and has a latch for the screen and inductive buttons for wifi and other functions. and believe it or not the battery life is 4 hours. its a genuine HP with a lithium cell battery, its only a 10watt cpu but to me thats crazy for a 2007 computer!.
And the weirdest thing about this computer, which me and my friend were torn whither if the original owner swapped the HDD for an SSD, because it is relatively quite, however after i opened the bottom covers. It made me very surprised
Its a friggin ipod classic style mini drive!!!
This is brilliant. I’d love to see a market flooded with these landfill-candidates running Linux, and perfectly usable.
Old laptops can be another good thing. Back in the times of Win98, when Microsoft issued stickers with license keys for Win and Office, I got hold of five laptops from a bankruptcy auction for about a dollar each because they didn’t work.
I took them apart for RAMs and harddisks (quite successfully, only one RAM was botchy), and then took the saw to the cases, cutting out the part with the license stickers on the back.
I sold them to a business for about five dollars a piece…
the first thing was install FreeBSD. I have always been intrigued by it, a UNIX like OS that was by design meant to replace UNIX
FreeBSD descends from the Berkeley Software Distribution, a descendant of Bell Labs Unix. As it is very much a pedigreed Unix, you don’t have to say “UNIX like”. :)
Fun fact: The network sockets API that is (or was originally) used by every major OS for internet protocol support came from BSD.
Edit: You might enjoy these Unix family trees…
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Unix_history-simple.svg
stosay
antix is a great little distro. I’ve run it on similarly low-power machines, like a former Chromebook I repaired. And I quite enjoy its quirky interface, sort of a blend between old fashioned chunky UI and modern streamlined UX.
I love fixing old computers. Most older hardware can still do 90% of people need as long as you have enough RAM for the web browser. I am attempting to convert my parents to Linux.
I have the same from cca. 2009 with SSD, docking station and 9-cell battery, running Debian and still going strong, mine was used for controlling my RPi-driven CNC router (cncjs).
Is that a ZIF 1.8" HDD? What did you end up doing to it?
I’ll let everyone else get into the technical stuff while I get into the personal stuff.
That’s a guy you get a beer with!!! Did you get his info and are you gonna hang out? Dude has some knowledge to spill.
what a great read!
That era of mini touch pads always upset me. Here it does kinda make sense for the size, though.
I seriously miss having physical mouse buttons that can be felt when they click on a touchpad. I end up using a separate mouse on any laptop that I use regularly.
We have one of these at work. We use it as the switch manager. Serial to rj45 management port is nice without any virtualization
