old laptop questions!
 

hi all

So I have 4 old laptops and they literally have no use and are fairly dated, I think the oldest one is an intel atom based system. Anyway I was looking at openwrt to install on one of them.

Can I actually use the laptop to have it connected to my Wi-Fi network to feed my server over LAN?

thanks.

yes, I think it is possible, but it will be terribly slow.

Thanks! It will be temporary while I set my server and pc’s up until I can get starlink :).

you can check this: https://superuser.com/questions/1631...r-with-xubuntu
(something similar should work)

In terms of leaving it running 24/7, laptops aren't great. Your battery, which is already likely a dud, will sit on overcharge and warm or heat. You could remove it, but then your power supply, battery plug, and your mains supply all come under scrutiny because the smallest of outages kills the laptop. Make sure no human intervention is needed from login.

Aging laptops are known to overheat - dust on heat sink, & dried thermal paste being the principal culprits. Also dust clogging input vents, or restricted airflow.

Consider these issues before you proceed.

Didn’t consider this! Thank you.

Old stuffs work best with distros running in RAM.

only to an extent, if its too old then it may not have enough ram to run things in ram.....

One solution to keep in mind is Alien Bob's Liveslak usb distro. It has everything in .sxz files (Squashfs) and has a full Slackware install and some choices, but only uses 800MB-1G when running. No features are compromised, except perhaps speed. It's all on slackware.nl. I have one, with XFCE, 32bit Multilib, wine and about 7G of a databasde program all running from it. It's put together by his iso2usb.sh script.

http://slackware.nl

I have some old laptops, including a couple of old thinkpads.
The really old ones may need an older version of linux for installation.
The newer kernels are just too big because they include EVERYTHING.
For the thinkpads, I have started with a Slackware 13, because it could be
installed from the CDROM.

AFTER you get the first install done, then you can upgrade the installation.

For me, this involves making a custom kernel with support for any special hardware you have,
and none of the support for equipment that will never be there (like RAID, every odd network device, video cards, odd sound cards).
This will cut your kernel down to something reasonable for the laptop.

I used to run Linux on a machine that only had 32 Meg of working memory. It had 64 Meg before I dropped a screwdriver on the motherboard,
but that is an old story and that machine got too old to upgrade anything.
It depends upon what you are going to try to do on it.

What you will be short of is hard disk space.
To upgrade to a more recent kernel, you have to be able to install the source and compile that kernel.
Temporarily using an external hard drive is possible. It cannot be a memory stick, as the will be way too much disk writing for those.
You can use the bootable CDROM for moving files around, but not for compiling, because the main memory can be used to hold the file system or it can be used for compiling, but not both at the same time.

I have compiled a kernel for another machine, using my main machine, and giving it a separate build directory. You can then specify a kernel config for the laptop, specify the CPU type, and compile the kernel files into a package. This is supported by the build.
Include some of the power saving features in the kernel build, and choose the power saving frequency governer.
You can make a kernel that will be much more compatible with the laptop you actually have than any generic kernel installation can be.
You will also find drivers for some of the odd things that are on laptops, and those are generally not in the generic installation kernels.
You can then install this package on the laptop, using a bootable CDROM.

It will be plenty fast enough for most things. Plenty fast enough for typing and email.
I would not play a recent video game on it.
As older tech, the weight, the screen size, and keeping the battery reasonable will be the difficulty.
But, as because newer laptops have such overpowered CPU, they use so much power, that the battery life will not actually be much worse for that older laptop.

You might find CLFS useful. This is "cross-LFS" and allows you to create a Linux From Scratch system for a different machine, for example one on which you cannot do builds directly because of limited memory.
https://trac.clfs.org/