I booted Buildroot with kernel 5.17 on a Pentium II laptop off a CD I burned once - I needed to dump a drive once and that was the only hardware I had on hand that could dump 2.5β IDE drives and had a working CD drive so I could boot something other than the operating system installed on the drive.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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https://shop.hak5.org/products/shark-jack technically runs openwrt.
SoC: 580MHz MediaTek MT7628 mips CPU
Memory: 64 MB DDR2 RAM, 64 MB SPI Flash
Yes the laptop CPU and RAM may be upgradeable but have you considered the parts availability? Considering its a 32bit CPU
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I think the weakest computer Iβve had Linux on was an original Xbox running DSL.
amazing, well done! i run Debian on cheap used Thinkcentre PCs, run as k3s worker nodes just fine.
May I ask what are the specs and size of those Thinkcentres? I have one I'm using as a server and planning to upgrade the CPU because it has a dual core one, and someone offered me the same one I have, but it's pretty big. I'd prefer to use the tiny models when I can buy some :D
Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q, Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p
separate cheap newer N100 cpu node for jellyfin, other encoding
Intel NUC NUC8i5BEHS for k3s control plane, little more expensive but reliable.
i usually replace Thinkcentre fans w noctua for power draw, performance, and noise. and remove wifi module, not needed, draws power, closed blob firmware, is a risk. pops out easy, no config changes needed in Debian.
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That uptime though.
Is this one of those old obscenely small obscenely underpowered net books?
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And Xfce4 doing the ~~light~~ heavy lifting as usual.
Pfft, what no LXDE
even better LXQT
canβt even do video playback on VLC.
I remember back in the day when I downloaded the first divx file my K6-400 couldn't smoothly play... I had been so used to thinking of that as a powerhouse coming from my Pentium 60, which was the first one I ran Linux on.
That's strange, what distro are you running on this hardware? VLC has been around for a long time, so while older hardware might not support versions of it that support newer codecs, I'd imagine it should be able to do at least some video playbook on older versions of VLC.
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Those Tualatin core CPUs were absolutely fantastic. They doubled them and made the Core2. I had one running for 10+ years. I don't know what it was about the bios but it was the fastest boot PC I ever built.
Huehuehue Br
Pretty sure my dad's secondary desktop I used for my first Linux install had a 1.2 GHz Duron or something and 512 MB. I'm pretty sure I got that funky compiz fusion 3D-cube desktop running on there π