I finally converted my old i5-2410 to Lubuntu 20. I was tired of waiting
over 5 minutes for my windows 10 laptop to boot up and at least the pc
will have another 5 years of life that I could use for email or web
browsing or even telneting to bbses. I thought this would be better for
the plannet than to buy another laptop right now.


---
■ Talisman ■ Inland Utopia - telnet://iutopia.duckdns.org:2023

Re: Linux on old laptop
By: Utopian Galt to All on Sun Nov 07 2021 07:08 pm

I finally converted my old i5-2410 to Lubuntu 20. I was tired of waiting over 5 minutes for my windows 10 laptop to boot up and at least the pc
will have another 5 years of life that I could use for email or web
browsing or even telneting to bbses. I thought this would be better for
the plannet than to buy another laptop right now.

just run windows 10 or windows 7.

by the way, get a ssd and your load time will be very fast.
---
■ Synchronet ■ ::: BBSES.info - free BBS services :::

just run windows 10 or windows 7.

by the way, get a ssd and your load time will be very fast.

Cant. The system cant support the ssd drive i paid for, refused to boot
up.


---
■ Talisman ■ Inland Utopia - telnet://iutopia.duckdns.org:2023

On 11/8/21 14:06, Utopian Galt wrote:

just run windows 10 or windows 7.

by the way, get a ssd and your load time will be very fast.

Cant. The system cant support the ssd drive i paid for, refused
to boot up.

Wild... could probably try clonezilla to copy your old drive to the new
drive. No idea on how/why it wouldn't boot though. (2.5" Sata SSD?)
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
---
￭ Synchronet ￭ Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com

Quoting Tracker1 to Utopian Galt <=-

On 11/8/21 14:06, Utopian Galt wrote:

just run windows 10 or windows 7.

by the way, get a ssd and your load time will be very fast.

Cant. The system cant support the ssd drive i paid for, refused
to boot up.

Wild... could probably try clonezilla to copy your old drive to the new drive. No idea on how/why it wouldn't boot though. (2.5" Sata SSD?)
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com

-!-
¡ Synchronet ¡ Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com

I've got a host of laptops running *buntu 20.04, and my servers. I have a
sole laptop that dual boots with Windows 10 (will be 11 when it is allowed
to upgrade.)

With server management and programming, IMHO, the *nix environment rocks. Couple that with an installation of VS Code and you'll have quite a system
for a few more years.

Working with Windows, SafeBoot or whatever they are calling their boot protection scheme must be disabled.

SSDs are the way to go. YMMV, but you
can boot to a live Ubuntu 20.04 USB drive, attach the SSD to the system and
do a dd if=<path to old drive> of=<path to new drive> and it will copy the image of the old drive to the new. Just make sure the new drive is larger
than the original.

Once dd is finished, open gparted and expand the partition to fill the
drive, using ntfsresize -- I believe that gparted will ask you if you want
to run it -- to resize the ntfs information to match the partition.

Once you boot into Windows, run a chkdisk on it and you should be good to
go.

Good luck and happy computing!

Jazzy J

* AmyBW v2.16 *
... You can logout any time you like, but you can never leave!

---
■ Synchronet ■ BayouBBS.Net, Ports 23, 6401 and 6402

Jazzy J wrote to Tracker1 <=-

@MSGID: <61B4CEB3.233.dove-unix@jayscafe.net>
@REPLY: <618D6F1B.371.dove-unix@roughneckbbs.com>

Quoting Tracker1 to Utopian Galt <=-

On 11/8/21 14:06, Utopian Galt wrote:

just run windows 10 or windows 7.

by the way, get a ssd and your load time will be very fast.

Cant. The system cant support the ssd drive i paid for, refused
to boot up.

Wild... could probably try clonezilla to copy your old drive to the new drive. No idea on how/why it wouldn't boot though. (2.5" Sata SSD?)
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com

-!-
¡ Synchronet ¡ Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com

I've got a host of laptops running *buntu 20.04, and my servers. I
have a sole laptop that dual boots with Windows 10 (will be 11 when it
is allowed to upgrade.)

With server management and programming, IMHO, the *nix environment
rocks. Couple that with an installation of VS Code and you'll have
quite a system for a few more years.

Working with Windows, SafeBoot or whatever they are calling their boot protection scheme must be disabled.

SSDs are the way to go. YMMV, but you
can boot to a live Ubuntu 20.04 USB drive, attach the SSD to the system and do a dd if=<path to old drive> of=<path to new drive> and it will
copy the image of the old drive to the new. Just make sure the new
drive is larger than the original.

Once dd is finished, open gparted and expand the partition to fill the drive, using ntfsresize -- I believe that gparted will ask you if you
want to run it -- to resize the ntfs information to match the
partition.

Once you boot into Windows, run a chkdisk on it and you should be good
to go.

Good luck and happy computing!

Jazzy J

* AmyBW v2.16 *
... You can logout any time you like, but you can never leave!

---
= Synchronet = BayouBBS.Net, Ports 23, 6401 and 6402

My Laptop is a Thinkpad T43, and I'm running Debian Bullseye. Works Ok, except the HDD doesn't start properly when cool. Can't find an IDE SSD for that machine.

Linux is a great way to get extra lifespan out of an old machine.

... MultiMail, the new multi-platform, multi-format offline reader!
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
■ Synchronet ■ MS & RD BBs - bbs.mozysswamp.org

Re: Linux on old laptop
By: Utopian Galt to All on Sun Nov 07 2021 11:08 am

I finally converted my old i5-2410 to Lubuntu 20. I was tired of waiting over 5 minutes for my windows 10 laptop to boot up and at least the pc
will have another 5 years of life that I could use for email or web
browsing or even telneting to bbses. I thought this would be better for
the plannet than to buy another laptop right now.

Earlier in 2021 I converted all of my computers from Windows to Linux (Pop!_OS for PCs and Debian for SBCs) and I haven't looked back. I do have a spare SSD in my primary driver that boots Windows 11 as a fallback, but really the only time boot it is monthly to apply updates to Windows.

I think you made a good choice on keeping stuff out of the landfill; however, for what it's worth, I've made a real push during the last 4-5 years to refresh my systems with very power efficient systems for my project, tinkering, and work. Older systems generally consume more electricity, so that's something to keep in mind to potentially offset environmental impact when you do decide to upgrade.

-WitNik

-WitNik

---
■ Synchronet ■ * Origin: Beggar's Canyon - beggarscyn.com *

Re: Linux on old laptop
By: WitNik to Utopian Galt on Sat Dec 25 2021 11:30 am

I think you made a good choice on keeping stuff out of the landfill; however, for what it's worth, I've made a real push during
the
last 4-5 years to refresh my systems with very power efficient systems for my project, tinkering, and work. Older systems
generally
consume more electricity, so that's something to keep in mind to potentially offset environmental impact when you do decide to
upgrade.

That's an excellent point, by the way.

Recently I checked to see how much power was being used by the "media PC" type of devices we were using for watching the boob tube. Once was a decade-old Athlon64 dual-core box with spinning rust in it, with our PS4 being used for Netflix and Prime.

Both utilized >40W constantly when on, with spikes higher than that depending on the workload.

Have replaced the media PC completely and the media-watching stuff from the PS4 with a Raspberry Pi 4, which consumes about 6W when working hard, and I'm not sure how much when idle - the kill-a-watt meter reads 0 or 1 watt, most of the time on 0.

The guts of the media PC box are going to head off to recycling.

---
■ Synchronet ■ ... The Basement ... Not really open yet.

On 12/24/21 04:18, Boraxman wrote:

Cant. The system cant support the ssd drive i paid for, refused
to boot up.

Wild... could probably try clonezilla to copy your old drive to the
new drive. No idea on how/why it wouldn't boot though. (2.5" Sata
SSD?)

My Laptop is a Thinkpad T43, and I'm running Debian Bullseye. Works
Ok, except the HDD doesn't start properly when cool. Can't find an
IDE SSD for that machine.

Linux is a great way to get extra lifespan out of an old machine.

Gotcha, didn't realize it was quite that old... *might* be able to try a
newer drive via USB boot assuming the bios on that old device supports
it. May also be able to find a PCMCIA adapter if there's one on the
laptop. No idea on drivers for that though.

Looks like it's USB 2.0 ... so 30-60 MBps transfer rate... just about
any USB 2-3 external drive should be able to make that, probably as fast
as your internal hdd, or a hair slower. Again, assuming it will boot to
USB at all.

A decent USB 3.x thumb drive could also work... 64gb drives are
relatively cheap at this point, but random io vs. sustained io is kind
of a crap shoot, but most should handle it... or USB<->sata hdd/ssd.
Don't know that there's much reason to go ssd over hdd given the
bandwidth limits, but wouldn't hurt and should have a longer lifetime.
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
---
￭ Synchronet ￭ Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com

On 12/25/21 12:30, WitNik wrote:

Earlier in 2021 I converted all of my computers from Windows to Linux (Pop!_OS for PCs and Debian for SBCs) and I haven't looked back. I do
have a spare SSD in my primary driver that boots Windows 11 as a
fallback, but really the only time boot it is monthly to apply updates
to Windows.

Similar here, though I did put a windows drive in for a work project,
the work laptop (macbook pro i9) has some issues running the main work solution (.Net with around 120 projects) and the i9 mac is constantly at
the thermal limit (max fans)... so the clean drive in windows only for
work stuff is better. Other than that, all linux or macos (got an m1
laptop a few months ago).

I think you made a good choice on keeping stuff out of the landfill; however, for what it's worth, I've made a real push during the last
4-5 years to refresh my systems with very power efficient systems for
my project, tinkering, and work. Older systems generally consume more electricity, so that's something to keep in mind to potentially offset environmental impact when you do decide to upgrade.

I'm a bit spoiled, but usually buy around the upper mid-range, so even
if I only get a couple years of use (2-3) I pass it on, and usually sees
6+ additional years out of it... my old i7-4790k is still running at a friend's place.

Main desktop is an r9-5950x w/ 128gb ram and rtf-3080... I can't see
myself needing/wanting to upgrade any time soon... only a handful of
things even come close to pushing it. Video projects still feel
sluggish at times for encoding. the prior mentioned work project hits a
bit at the build too, a few minutes for a build (~80s for rebuild), and running the background service (containerized) and the vs debugger on
the app(s) uses around 72gb ram. The i9 mbp was taking nearly 40m for build/rebuild.

Fortunately when I get back after the holiday will be working more on micro-service migrations, so far less issues with the monolith.

Aside: I'm honestly amazed how well the m1 macbook runs things... and
the battery life is just awesome as hell, generally go a few days of
casual use without needing to plug in. I do have wireguard/ssh setup so
I can access my desktop if/when I need more oomph, but haven't needed to
much.
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
---
￭ Synchronet ￭ Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com

Tracker1 wrote to Boraxman <=-

@MSGID: <61C9C0AE.376.dove-unix@roughneckbbs.com>
@REPLY: <61C5AF3B.2876.dove-nix@bbs.mozysswamp.org>
On 12/24/21 04:18, Boraxman wrote:

Cant. The system cant support the ssd drive i paid for, refused
to boot up.

Wild... could probably try clonezilla to copy your old drive to the
new drive. No idea on how/why it wouldn't boot though. (2.5" Sata
SSD?)

My Laptop is a Thinkpad T43, and I'm running Debian Bullseye. Works
Ok, except the HDD doesn't start properly when cool. Can't find an
IDE SSD for that machine.

Linux is a great way to get extra lifespan out of an old machine.

Gotcha, didn't realize it was quite that old... *might* be able to try
a newer drive via USB boot assuming the bios on that old device
supports it. May also be able to find a PCMCIA adapter if there's one
on the laptop. No idea on drivers for that though.

Looks like it's USB 2.0 ... so 30-60 MBps transfer rate... just about
any USB 2-3 external drive should be able to make that, probably as
fast as your internal hdd, or a hair slower. Again, assuming it will
boot to USB at all.

A decent USB 3.x thumb drive could also work... 64gb drives are
relatively cheap at this point, but random io vs. sustained io is kind
of a crap shoot, but most should handle it... or USB<->sata hdd/ssd.
Don't know that there's much reason to go ssd over hdd given the
bandwidth limits, but wouldn't hurt and should have a longer lifetime.

No CD/DVD Rom?


... MultiMail, the new multi-platform, multi-format offline reader!
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
■ Synchronet ■ MS & RD BBs - bbs.mozysswamp.org

Re: Linux on old laptop
By: Trikester to WitNik on Sun Dec 26 2021 04:15 pm

Re: Linux on old laptop
By: WitNik to Utopian Galt on Sat Dec 25 2021 11:30 am

I think you made a good choice on keeping stuff out of the landfill; howe the
last 4-5 years to refresh my systems with very power efficient systems fo generally
consume more electricity, so that's something to keep in mind to potentia upgrade.

That's an excellent point, by the way.

Recently I checked to see how much power was being used by the "media PC" ty

Both utilized >40W constantly when on, with spikes higher than that dependin

Have replaced the media PC completely and the media-watching stuff from the

The guts of the media PC box are going to head off to recycling.

Back in the early 2000's I had plans of turning an old laptop into a media
and GPS device for my truck. After all the owrk it would've taken to wire it in and make sure it got safe regulated voltage, I could've bought a GPS and
MP3 player

---
■ Synchronet ■ The Cave BBS - Since 1992 - cavebbs.homeip.net

Re: Linux on old laptop
By: Utopian Galt to All on Sun Nov 07 2021 07:08 pm

I finally converted my old i5-2410 to Lubuntu 20. I was tired of waiting over 5 minutes for my windows 10 laptop to boot up and at least the pc
will have another 5 years of life that I could use for email or web
browsing or even telneting to bbses. I thought this would be better for
the plannet than to buy another laptop right now.

I know this is over 6 months since you posted, but I just want to echo how incredible it is to extend old hardware in this way. I used elementaryOS, a Linux flavor known for its simplicity and out-of-box resemblance to macOS, and it revived a circa 2008 MacBook Pro that I am using for this very use case: browsing the web, checking email, and telnetting into BBS'es. Strongly recommend it.
-=- Kaelon -=-

Re: Linux on old laptop
By: Kaelon to Utopian Galt on Sun May 01 2022 02:07 pm

Re: Linux on old laptop

Not Linux, but I use OpenBSD under an old Atom N270 netbook
with:

- cwm
- tmux
- mpv+yt-dlp
- sfeed
- nsxiv cli tools
- mednafen/nethack/slashem/nfrotz
- catgirl
- bitlbee and
- lynx/links.

For cursed JS sites I use luakit.
Specs:

\- -/ os OpenBSD 7.1
\_/ \ host 0493200000001C00000300000
| O O | uptime 9h 47m
|_ < ) 3 ) pkgs 441
/ \ / memory 615M / 1015M
/-_____-\


Most resources are being used by Links -g rendering a huge page
but fast as hell.
With the previous OSes (XP or 7 starter), the netbook would be a
doorstopper.

-- Unix junkie --

Is mpv better than vlc when it comes to video playback? vlc struggles to play videos on my twelve-year-old laptop.

... He who laughs first probably got the joke

Re: Re: Linux on old laptop
By: unixl0rd to anthk on Wed Aug 03 2022 08:22 pm

Is mpv better than vlc when it comes to video playback? vlc struggles to play videos on my twelve-year-old laptop.

In my experience, there isn't much difference, but maybe. MPV seems to work the best on my laptop, and it is more than 12 years old (Its still 32 bit).

But hi-resolution videos are going to struggle from the computational demands.

---
■ Synchronet ■ MiND'S EYE BBS - Melb, Australia - mindseye.synchronetbbs.org

On 05 Aug 2022, Boraxman said the following...

But hi-resolution videos are going to struggle from the computational demands.

primary question basically is if your laptop has hardware accelerated
decoding .. for example h264 playing fine and h265 chopping and playing like hot garbage. since older laptops wouldn't support the newer codec.

vlc has some settings to enable/disable/adjust the decoder. on occasion the software decoder works better (for very early divx stuff, but perhaps for other instances)

... A book misplaced is a book lost

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
* Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi

Is mpv better than vlc when it comes to video playback? vlc struggles to
play videos on my twelve-year-old laptop.

Last evening, I was watching HD videos using vlc on my atomic pi (running debian 11) without issue. I tried watching them on mpv and the video and
sound "stuck" a lot.

The atomic pi uses a more modern CPU than a 12 y/o laptop, but I think it is only single-core and it does not have much memory, so it might be a fair observation. Your mileage may vary, though.


* SLMR 2.1a * A restless eye across a weary room...

---
■ Synchronet ■ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP

Re: Re: Linux on old laptop
By: Dumas Walker to UNIXL0RD on Fri Aug 05 2022 09:45 am

In my case, I have this ~/.config/mpv/config file for an Atom netbook

ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=?420][fps<=?30][vcodec!=?vp9]+bestaudio/best vo=xv
audio-pitch-correction=no
quiet=yes
pause=no
vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all

For youtube, I use these little tools:

git://codemadness.org/frontends

once compiled, I puta a yts func in ~/.profile such as:

yts()="/src/frontends/youtube/cli "$@" | less ; }

yts "whatever"

then I select the link, I paste it to mpv in a terminal, and
the video plays fast on this potato.



-- Unix junkie --

fusion wrote to Boraxman <=-

On 05 Aug 2022, Boraxman said the following...

primary question basically is if your laptop has hardware accelerated decoding .. for example h264 playing fine and h265 chopping and playing like hot garbage. since older laptops wouldn't support the newer codec.

My 2020 Roku TV has a bit of a problem with h.265. Not a show-stopper, but h.264 plays much more smoothly.



... The exception also declares the rule
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
■ Synchronet ■ .: realitycheckbbs.org :: scientia potentia est :.

Re: Re: Linux on old laptop
By: poindexter FORTRAN to fusion on Fri Aug 05 2022 07:31 am

fusion wrote to Boraxman <=-

On 05 Aug 2022, Boraxman said the following...

primary question basically is if your laptop has hardware accelerated decoding .. for example h264 playing fine and h265 chopping and playing like hot garbage. since older laptops wouldn't support the newer codec.

My 2020 Roku TV has a bit of a problem with h.265. Not a show-stopper, but h.264 plays much more smoothly.

that's pathetic. you should return it.
---
■ Synchronet ■ ::: BBSES.info - free BBS services :::

Re: Re: Linux on old laptop
By: unixl0rd to anthk on Wed Aug 03 2022 08:22 pm

Is mpv better than vlc when it comes to video playback? vlc struggles to pla

I would not know if it is "better", but I rarely find any issues playing video files with mpv or mplayer.

--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken

---
■ Synchronet ■ Palantir BBS * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL

Re: Linux on old laptop
By: anthk to Kaelon on Mon Aug 01 2022 12:51 pm

Re: Linux on old laptop
By: Kaelon to Utopian Galt on Sun May 01 2022 02:07 pm

Re: Linux on old laptop

Not Linux, but I use OpenBSD under an old Atom N270 netbook
with:

- cwm
- tmux
- mpv+yt-dlp
- sfeed
- nsxiv cli tools
- mednafen/nethack/slashem/nfrotz
- catgirl
- bitlbee and
- lynx/links.

For cursed JS sites I use luakit.
Specs:

\- -/ os OpenBSD 7.1
\_/ \ host 0493200000001C00000300000
| O O | uptime 9h 47m
|_ < ) 3 ) pkgs 441
/ \ / memory 615M / 1015M
/-_____-\

Most resources are being used by Links -g rendering a huge page
but fast as hell.
With the previous OSes (XP or 7 starter), the netbook would be a doorstopper.

-- Unix junkie --

Pretty awesome setup. Never heard or seen OpenBSD on an Atom!
---
■ Synchronet ■ Diamond Mine Online BBS - bbs.dmine.net:24 - Fredericksburg, VA USA