The first thing is to get a total of 4 GB ram (looks like the max for this cpu) into it and an ssd. These are both very cheap atm. See if there’s a video available for your particular model on the internet about getting into the case for the upgrade. Install a lightweight Linux distro. I have a similar 11 year old laptop and it’s working nicely for browsing/video play etc. with Zorin Lite. Good luck!
Why not? I’m doing the same, I have a dual boot windows/linux and a 2nd SSD is shared for data/pic/whatever and it’s a standard NTFS drive formatted by windows. It is very reliable, never had a single problem reading/writing to it from linux.
Today’s Arch is so simple to install as Artix, because of archinstall. Still, the daily use of both is full of CLI, since is the only recommend way to manage packages, besides Gui flatpaks. I would never recommend neither of they to someone that doesn’t like terminal.
I also got an old notebook, atom N260 32 bits, 3GB of RAM. I put a 128GB SSD, then I installed MX Linux with Xfce (MX21.3_386) and it’s usable for light tasks. Yes browsing heavy sites is slow, but everything else works pretty well.
I know many people in the self-hosting community re-purpose old laptops as lightweight web servers. If you’re interested in learning Linux, this machine would be a good one to learn on for a lightweight distro.
Absolutely you should care! The more people that demand this capability the more that Intel and AMD will have to offer this kind of support. In fact, we should demand that the Intel Management Engine and the AMD equivalent be equipped with capability to completely disable it.
Technically speaking, Intel can take steps to make it easier for consumers to prevent ME from booting.
Take AMD for example. In 2027, AMD plans to publish OpenSIL, which will basically give the community keys to the initialisation of silicon (which includes AMD PSP). Of course, Intel being the POS that they are aren’t going to do that
Bit of a noob question wrt IME, but I noticed a toggle in the linux kernel configuration menu to disable IME the other day when I was compiling my first custom kernel. I understand that IME is a separate processor with separate network access that operates at or below the BIOS/UEFI level of the system. Does the linux kernel option actually do anything? And if not why is it there.
It doesn’t seem like that should be able to do anything, knowing what I do know about the IME
Lubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu…I’ve gone from Lu to Xu, but I think I’ll end up with ku because PipeWire and wayland and flatpak (I get the impression that they’re the way forward for the next while…). They’ll make pretty much anything work better than whatever windows version retired them.
It is actually possible to use BTRFS with Windows. I’ve had some success using this tool between Linux and Windows, it can do in-place conversions of an NTFS drive if you need as well.
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