Ask HN: What to do with a spare laptop?

[vdibart]

I'm sure this has been asked a million times but I can only scroll back so far : )

I have a 2 or 3 year old IBM Thinkpad with Windows on it that I don't really use because I have both a desktop and a work-issued laptop, both with Windows. I was thinking of installing Linux on it, but don't have a ton of time to waste down the rabbit hole of drivers, etc. Any suggestions for what I should do with it? Install Linux? If so, which distro? Do something else with it? Your suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[yan]

If you already have a workable computer, give it to a relative who needs one, or sell it. No need to stock up on hardware other people can find useful.

You can also keep it as a spare, but that's wasteful. Computers are a commodity.

[fsniper]

I'm using my old celeron 1.5GHz laptop as a linux server for my company. It runs dhcpd, bind for the network, apache, mysql, postgresql, tomcat for development purposes, zoneminder for a camera (not in use anymore), in all their respective openvz containers. And it's doing pretty well with a cooler. Before the cooler it was hot as hell. Just only once, I put my lucene indexer in ab infinite loop that i had not figured out before it shut self down with it's acpi cpu protection rules :). So if you're in need of a simple server try it.

[tug61granpa]

I'm a neewbie to computing, old[63], on minimum wage , and not tech-savvy at all. However I've managed to install Mint Linux on 2 elderly pc's and Ubuntu on an early Asus eee. All can be downloaded for free quite quickly and easily. An installation disc for Mint costs £3.99 in the UK. After XP Linux is a joy to use, go on, have a go.

[sshconnection]

I just finished installing Karmic Koala on an old D610. A while ago, I went ahead and slapped 2 gigs of ram in it, up from the like 512 it came with, and under Karmic this thing runs like a champ. Give it a try, it breathed new life into my old clunker.

[ErrantX]

War driving and wireless sniffing - even decrypt some networks (with permission). And more..

A security distro like Backtrack will give you hours of random fun playing with all the tools.

Something a bit different anyway.

[javanix]

Put linux on it. The "rabbit hole of drivers" doesn't really exist any longer, and a passing familiarity with linux can really be a useful skill to have.

[vdibart]

That's good to hear. Linux doesn't scare me at all. It's Linux on a laptop that scares me. I'm a command line kind of guy, but not a hardware kind of guy. I just want to spend time being productive, not chasing down info in forums. Last time I had Linux on a laptop (a long time ago) it took literally a PhD to help me get it done.

[CyberFonic]

If you want command line, then you can edit the /etc/rc* files to startup into a full-screen terminal if you like. There's nothing that says you must run Gnome/KDE/etc.

Karmic Koala Beta runs on virtually everything I've tried it on with no driver problems, even wierd built-in webcams on notebooks.

If you want to go really minimal, then you could run Debian (upon which Ubuntu is based). I have a Compaq Armada running Debian without problems.

[ja27]

You could grab the latest Ubuntu CD image (the new 9.10 ships on Thursday) and give it a try in live cd mode. That will give you a good idea of how much will work without chasing down drivers.

[vdibart]

Great suggestion! Thanks for the heads up on this.