Acer Aspire resurrection

[eltheanine]

I recently dragged out an Acer Aspire 3500 from a storage unit I was renting... it is from I guess mid or early 2000s? Boots with Manjaro from 2013 with 3.10 Linux kernel, and works surprisingly snappy.

I am detailing it all on this post on my blog, and so far am thinking of making it into something to play music in my garage/workshop which is separate to my house. I do have ethernet to the shed which might be handy as wifi on the Acer doesn't work at least under Manjaro, and it has a headphone jack - so now I need to work out what to run on it to play music from my (proxmox based) NAS. I am not opposed to running and lxc container to run something for sharing the music, but that might be beyond the scope of the challenge... which I have basically set for myself to utilise old hardware to fill an actual need instead of it going to landfill. (Or more realistically, otherwise being in a box for another decade or so).

[zero cool]

That's pretty sweet tbh! Laptops of that era don't get any love what so ever. That being said, they're mostly just shiny garbage. But still! Approved.

[eltheanine]

Very true hah. Celeron inside

I friend is suggesting I pacman -Syu and see if I can bring it to current

[rollcat]

Oh my, I was looking to purchase my first new laptop around 2007/8; but a median machine of that era was just a pile of shiny trash (glossy screens, yuck!), so ended up getting a second-hand Thinkpad ^^

Around that time, Asus made a really cool move to bring the insanely cheap EEE PC to the market - that thing was waayyy too underpowered to run Windows Vista, and had a big hand in keeping XP supported & alive until ~2014. They basically ran their own "old computer challenge" at scale, and turned the eyes of the industry for a hot moment, making everyone reconsider the real hardware requirements of contemporary computing.

I feel like with M-series Macs, Apple did the exact opposite: my M1 felt insanely snappy on day 1, but I have a feeling that the software (most notably: JS-heavy websites) is now yet again catching up with hardware and just getting slower again. Maybe a $200ish Chromebook-like laptop with built-in aggressive ad blocker and 20h of usable battery life could turn that tide again?

[eltheanine]

And I am done. https://the.teabag.ninja/old-computer-challenge.html

Very happy with how this challenge prompted me to end up with a usable machine for playing music in my garage that otherwise would be going to the tip, and learned a few things along the way (like mounting a samba share in the terminal).

It ended up with:

- Void Linux 32bit base (no X/Wayland)
- Wifi works!!!
- Alsa, Samba, and MusikCube packages added.

And thats it.

[mavica]

i need more terminal pipe-drawn apps in my life