MPV is a much lighter video player. Try that.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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I booted Buildroot with kernel 5.17 on a Pentium II laptop off a CD I burned once - I needed to dump a drive once and that was the only hardware I had on hand that could dump 2.5β IDE drives and had a working CD drive so I could boot something other than the operating system installed on the drive.
Are we competing again?
I'm proud to be setting up a rhel10 desktop, as it'll be the first time I ran Linux as a desktop in 30 years of a Linux/Unix career.
To rephrase: I ran XFree86 on a 4mb i386 machine 30 years ago.
What do I win?
I didnt have the intention to compete, was just proud of seeing this 2007 laptop running a modern OS again!
That uptime though.
Is this one of those old obscenely small obscenely underpowered net books?
This one is actually obscenely underpowered but obscenely large laptop
I got you beat with my HP Mini running a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 that I use to develop games for the open source physiotherapy gamification device I made for my kid when I'm on the train.
Don't want to carry my full-size gaming laptop to work just to do some light lua coding.
Pfft, what no LXDE
even better LXQT
And Xfce4 doing the ~~light~~ heavy lifting as usual.
canβt even do video playback on VLC.
I remember back in the day when I downloaded the first divx file my K6-400 couldn't smoothly play... I had been so used to thinking of that as a powerhouse coming from my Pentium 60, which was the first one I ran Linux on.
amazing, well done! i run Debian on cheap used Thinkcentre PCs, run as k3s worker nodes just fine.
May I ask what are the specs and size of those Thinkcentres? I have one I'm using as a server and planning to upgrade the CPU because it has a dual core one, and someone offered me the same one I have, but it's pretty big. I'd prefer to use the tiny models when I can buy some :D
Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q, Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p
separate cheap newer N100 cpu node for jellyfin, other encoding
Intel NUC NUC8i5BEHS for k3s control plane, little more expensive but reliable.
i usually replace Thinkcentre fans w noctua for power draw, performance, and noise. and remove wifi module, not needed, draws power, closed blob firmware, is a risk. pops out easy, no config changes needed in Debian.
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I also daily drive LMDE on a... Considerably old inspiron, but not even close to being as old as the one in my post tho π
I think the weakest computer Iβve had Linux on was an original Xbox running DSL.
That's strange, what distro are you running on this hardware? VLC has been around for a long time, so while older hardware might not support versions of it that support newer codecs, I'd imagine it should be able to do at least some video playbook on older versions of VLC.
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Huehuehue Br
I've got an Acer Aspire from 2008 running mint on an Intel Atom and 1 GB memory (might be 2, I forget). It is slow but very usable except for video and such.
It's not that bad. I run Linux on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, which is much weaker than this. (It's not a competition, though. Just saying.) And that's also a pretty standard device. I'm kinda interested to see if anyone can go below 64M RAM with a modern installation.