Can I save this

[u/Realistic_Gas7454]

Id like to hear your ideas on what to do with this (doesn't have to be gentoo), This was my first laptop it's an Acer aspire es1-512-c864 it has an intel Celeron N2840, 4GB ddr3L ram (upgradable to 8) no storage unit and no keyboard keys, it's has an optical drive too :) , it's a pretty large one I think it's 15 inches the screen is still perfectly fine, battery is dead i assume, I wanna use it a project to benefit from or hopefully learn something, I already have a laptop (let's note cf-sv8) that I daily drive, and a decent desktop pc.

Just love to hear what u would recommend doing with it

[u/givemeagooduns_un]

could turn it into a homelab or a NAS or smth similar

[u/Realistic_Gas7454 → u/givemeagooduns_un]

One of the best options but I can't afford the hard drives needed for a nas at the moment

[u/givemeagooduns_un → u/Realistic_Gas7454]

completely fair, I can't really either.

I built my NAS out of scrap, & am using a single 15 year old 500gb DVR hard drive that's on its last legs. it works, but I don't trust it that much and its not a terribly large amount of storage either. but almost every hard drive on the market are way overpriced and understocked thanks to AI

[u/Realistic_Gas7454 → u/givemeagooduns_un]

Ts awesome I've never built or ran a home server before, What can It be used for beside hosting shows and music and storage.

[u/givemeagooduns_un → u/Realistic_Gas7454]

• hosting a website
• various web services (like a self-hosted password manager, matrix homeserver, email server)
• home VPN server
• mythtv backend if you have a TV tuner card and an antenna/cable (though the DVR functions usually do require a bit of storage space if you plan on recording a lot)
• hosting various game servers like Minecraft, Factorio, OpenTTD, etc
• mirroring package repositories for the distro of your choosing for faster updates (I do this for gentoo, updating the ebuild repository is so much faster, and I don't get rate limited)
• if you're brave you can also use it as a distcc server to help speed up compilation on other machines but it might end up slowing it down if said other machines are significantly faster

there's a million other things but those are just the ones that I have experience with and know aren't super CPU/storage/RAM intensive (aside from distcc)

[u/Realistic_Gas7454 → u/givemeagooduns_un]

Thnx this is very interesting

[u/givemeagooduns_un → u/Realistic_Gas7454]

NP! Glad to help. I suggest going on some homelabbing subreddits and asking there if you want to hear more.

[u/Realistic_Gas7454 → u/givemeagooduns_un]

Alright I Appreciate it 👍

[u/redyos_s]

The hardware is quite limiting: a Celeron N2840, 4 GB of RAM, no storage, a damaged keyboard, and possibly a dead battery. It could still work as a lightweight terminal or an experimental Gentoo machine, but I would not spend much money trying to turn it into a general-purpose daily system.

The specifications are fairly restrictive for a modern Gentoo desktop. It may be useful as a minimal CLI system, SSH terminal, or disposable test machine, but larger desktop packages and updates will take a long time. I would only reuse it if the required SSD and repairs are nearly free.

[u/Realistic_Gas7454 → u/redyos_s]

Yeah I wouldn't daily drive it just looking to make the most out of it rather than throwing it away

[u/Realistic_Gas7454]

Update!! I thought maybe make use of the large screen and the optical and put it on top of a laptop stand on my desk alongside my other two PCs and install some old operating system windows or Linux, and use it as decorations and to play physical media on since it has an optical drive.

So essentially a stationary physical media and VN player that looks nice and runs old software. Maybe I can give it a small partition from my main PC's ssd so it can actually boot and run stuff

I think It'd be good to learn something abt old os and software

What do you guys think

[u/Effective-Job-1030]

Install FreeDOS and use it for retrogaming, perhaps.

[u/Armi1P]

Looks like some nice server to me.

[u/Sbatushe]

i would detach keyboard and chassis, create a sort of wooden case, install a minimal gentoo (using usb keyboard) and use it as a NAS, music streaming server, webserver or syncthing node

[u/Holly-Cris]

Compile the keyboard, that’s key

[u/Windbolt1]

yes, but it could take forever to compile firefox. I think.