List of icons/services suggested:
- Calibre
- Jitsi
- Kiwix
- Monero (Node)
- Nextcloud
- Pihole
- Ollama (Should at least be able to run tiny-llama 1.1B)
- Open Media Vault
- Syncthing
- VLC Media Player Media Server
Y’all laugh but I’m getting into Linux and dusted off an old i7 laptop with 16gb of RAM. Slapped a $40 512GB ssd and linux mint on it to get into !selfhost@lemmy.ml!
…then promptly forgot about the laptop
Intel has been on the i3, i5, i7 naming scheme for a while though. I think the oldest ones are probably ~15 years old at this point.
i7 just marked their top of the line consumer products until they introduced the i9 in 2017. First models were introduced 2008, but I think the mobile versions came in 2010.
So yeah 15 years is pretty close.
It could be as old as 15 years… If someone bought a species out i7 laptop in 2009 they may have upgraded it to 16gb at some point. Seems realistic enough
Please stop. I’m only in my 30s but you’re making me feel like I’m 80. To me, old is a 386 with 4MB of RAM, a 40MB hard drive, Windows 3.1, and a turbo button. Audio was limited to a single channel square wave courtesy of the PC speaker, cause sound cards were expensive.
Or if you want to really talk old in the personal computing realm, then we’ll have to start bring up companies like Commodore, Atari, and Radio Shack. But their computers were before my time.
I have an Asus ROG laptop I bought in 2013 with a 3rd gen i7, whatever the gtx 660 mobile chip was and 16gb of ram, it’s definitely old by any definition, but swapping for an ssd makes it super useable, it’s the machine that lives in my garage as a shop/lab computer. To be fair, its job is web browsing, CAD touchups, slicing and PDF viewing most of the time, but I bet I could be more demanding on it.
I had been running mint w/ cinnamon on it before as I was concerned about resource usage, was a klipper and octoprint host to printer for a year and a bit. Wiped it and went for Debian with xfce becauae again, was originally concerned about resource usage but ended up swapping to KDE and I don’t notice any difference so it’s staying that way.
I really hate waste so I appreciate just how useable older hardware can be, Yeah there’s probably an era that’s less true but I’ll go out on a limb (based on feeling only) and suggest that anything in the last 15 years this’ll be true for, but that’s going to depend on what you’re trying to do with it, you won’t have all the capability of more modern hardware but frankly a lot of use cases probably don’t need that anyhow (web browsing, word processing, programming, music playback for sure, probably some video playback, pretty much haven’t hit a wall yet with my laptop)
I have a ten-year old MacBook Pro with an i7 and 16gb of ram. Just because this thing was a total beast when it was new does not mean it isn’t old now. works great with Ubuntu though. It’s still not a good idea to run it as a server though. My raspberry pi consumes a lot less energy for some basic web hosting tasks. I only use the old MBP to run memory intense docker containers like openrouteservice and I guess just using some hosting service for that would not be much more expensive.
“Old laptop” has a Core 2 Duo and 4GB of DDR2 RAM.
It also has a better keyboard with plenty of travel, on-the-go replaceable battery, easily accessible components likely to get replaced/upgraded/cleaned, large cooler, large selection of I/O, has higher likelihood to survive 2 more years than a brand new laptop and it can be used as a weapon or anchor.
That’s like 20 years old… An i7 is more accurate to the comic about a 10-year old laptop.
Yes, but requirements for a general use computer have barely changed in the past 10 years. Well, the only thing changing them is Windows 11.
I’ve used a 2007 mid-range (?) laptop up until it broke in early 2023. Core 2 Duo T7100 (later upgraded to T7500 bought on AliExpress for €1), 4GB of DDR2 RAM, GeForce 8600M GT, cheap 128GB SATA SSD (also from AliExpress). Perfectly usable with Linux Mint. For fun I put Windows 11 on it with Superfetch and BITS services disabled. Perfectly usable with that as well. The only game I tried on it was Asphalt 8 though, but it ran smoothly.
I want to get something like that again, but with support for more RAM. 4GB was the maximum.
An i7 laptop can be up to 15 years old. And memory is irrelevant as it could’ve been updated at any time in-between.
My current laptop is an i7 with 16 GB of RAM. Hardware requirements have plateaued pretty hard unless your trying to run something that requires the latest GPU.
Not really it’s just another unfinished project.
I want to play with nextcloud, homeassistant and tabbyml
Heres the template if anyone wants it
Know what? Fine. I’ll try Linux again. Tired of watching my craptop sit at 100% disk usage for 10 minutes before it starts responding. Mint is good to start with, ye?
Linux Mint cinnamon is gold standard for quality IMO. All my modern systems that can comfortably run it do.
That said it also uses more resources than your old craptop may like depending on just how old we are talking about.
If cinammon is a little slow, try mint xfce. Its a lot lighter on system resources. Last time i tried xfce it was a great performance compromise if a little unpolished in places.
If Mint xfce is also too slow you can give MX Linux a whirl. Its way faster and more minimal that mint out of the box. Yet it feels modern and allows you to install all the same programs as mint from the default software repo including flatpaks. MX fluxbox is probably as minimal as you would want to get. Try their flagship xfce first.
If you are trying to beat new life into a 25 year old dying dinosaur Puppy Linux will do it, but you won’t enjoy using it.
For a server for hosting services like in this meme? I always go Debian. Incredibly stable.
It’s mainly for movies and occasionally gaming on the go, and also my DDR machine. It’s got a 1050 so it’s… Not great, but it’s had hard drive struggles most of its life and I’ve tried everything up to reinstalling windows.
I agree, mint is a good place to start. If it turns out to be too much for your pc you could always try antix or q4os or puppy linux next, which is even more lightweight.
But I have recently found that mint is like a better version of ubuntu and I used to recommend ubuntu all the time because 9/10 times it just works.
Middle right panel is a cock and balls. (OP is into needle play.)
Ollama on a ten year old laptop? Lol, maybe at 1T/s for an 8B.
tinyllama 1.1b would probably run reasonably fast. Dumb as a rock for sure. But hey its a start! My 2015 t460 thinkpad laptop with an i7 6600U 2.6GhZ duo core was able to do llama 3.1 8B at 1.2T-1.7T/s which while definitely slow at about a word per second. Still, was also just fast enough to have fun in real time with conversation.
Than what are the minimal specs to run ollama (llama3 8b or preferably 27b) at a decent speed?
I have an old pc that now runs my plex and arr suite. Was thinking of upgrading it a bit and running ollama on it as well. It doesn’t have a gpu, so what else does it need? I don’t have a big budget, so no new nvidia card for me.
“decent speed” depends on your subjective opinion and what you want it to do. I think its fair to say if it can generate text around your slowest tolerable reading speed thats a bare minimum for real time conversational things. If you want a task done and don’t mind stepping away to get a coffee it can be much slower.
I was pleasantly suprised to get anything at all working on an old laptop. When thinking of AI my mind imagines super computers and thousand dollar rigs and data centers. I don’t think mobile computers like my thinkpad. But sure enough the technology is there and your old POS can adopt a powerful new tool if you have realistic expectations on matching model capacity with specs.
Tiny llama will work on a smartphone but its dumb. llama3.1 8B is very good and will work on modest hardware but you may have to be patient with it if especially if your laptop wasn’t top of the line when it was made 10 years ago. Then theres all the models in between.
The i7 6600U duo core 2.6ghz CPU in my laptop trying to run 8B was jusst barely enough to be passing grade for real time talking needs at 1.2-1.7 T/s it could say a short word or half of a complex one per second. When it needed to process something or recalculate context it took a hot minute or two.
That got kind of annoying if you were getting into what its saying. Bumping the PC up to a AMD ryzen 5 2600 6 core CPU was a night and day difference. It spits out a sentence very quick faster than my average reading speed at 5-6 t/s. Im still working on getting the 4GB RX 580 GPU used for offloading so those numbers are just with the CPU bump. RAM also matters DDR6 will beat DDR4 speed wise.
Heres a tip, most software has the models default context size set at 512, 2048, or 4092. Part of what makes llama 3.1 so special is that it was trained with 128k context so bump that up to 131072 in the settings so it isnt recalculating context every few minutes…
Heres a tip, most software has the models default context size set at 512, 2048, or 4092. Part of what makes llama 3.1 so special is that it was trained with 128k context so bump that up to 131072 in the settings so it isnt recalculating context every few minutes…
Some caveats, this massively increases memory usage (unless you quantize the cache with FA) and it also massively slows down CPU generation once the context gets long.
TBH you just need to not keep a long chat history unless you need it,.
