My aunt's got an old slightly broken laptop. She's got a new one. No one has any need for this old one anymore. It has no selling value. Etc etc etc.
I know I can put an SSD in it and run it on Linux to make it run smoothly as a laptop for emails and word processing etc, but I already have a crap old laptop for exactly that.
What sort of fun things can you do with an old laptop? I'm talking like, using it as a whole new device. Maybe using it as a 'TV Box' of sorts - getting some radio apps, and hacked streaming apps... Or loading up a bunch of PS2 games on it... or having it as the jankiest personal assistant, with timers, and calendars, and all that.
You know what I mean.
I love pointless gadgetry.
3 spare laptops i have one runs as a home server (i would recommend removing the battery if you do that, the constant charging and discharging makes them a fire hazard) which i use for jellyfin, smb shares (nextcloud is better than smb but i use smb for hosting my ps2 ISO for use with OPL), pihole, unbound, joplin, tandoor, discord bots, game servers on lan like my azerothcore server and probably some other shit I'm forgetting. Another laptop i use as a smart TV style thing for streaming from jellyfin using kodi, also runs a bunch of emulators for couch gaming and i use it to stream my desktop with moonlight. Other old laptop that can run XP i use for XP shit old nostalgia game stuff things I can't easily get running on a modern machine that's so niche nobody has any fixes for it. Another old laptop i turned into a hackintosh for funsies not useful but interesting to do
Is this all on Linux? What distro are you using?
Very interesting.
Yeah for my server I use ubuntu LTS cos its well supported and documented. For my TV one I use fedora cos fedora is neato as well as my other machines. Debian is another good choice for a server OS. I tend to run all my services in docker with docker compose as its simple to use with a few native services and some of my own built services as well all routed through nginx proxy to give them convenient domain names using pihole as the DNS.
Another tip i don't port foward and expose any of my server stuff to the public internet the risk of opening up my shodily made home server for everything to see is too high. For hosting things on the interwebs i spin up ephemeral vps machines for each thing only for as long as i need it
Amazing, thanks
Depending on the laptop, you can configure the charge controller to properly cycle the battery so it can function as a UPS. https://linrunner.de/tlp/faq/battery.html
Good call to be careful about it though, because you definitely should make sure its configured correctly if you're going to leave the battery in.
Even properly cycling it which I did for a bit using tlp i wouldn't trust. I've had too many devices go spicy pillow on me i just assume every lithium ion battery will inevitably end up exploding and take precautions. This especially so for an old laptop with an already degraded battery.
Daily scheduled data backups and just letting the server go offline for me are safer especially considering my server doesn't actually run anything critical that i can't just reprovision if it does corrupt itself since i have scripts that recreate it all from scratch.