Repurposing Old Hardware

Repurposing Old Hardware

I'm writing this at 3AM on a Saturday morning in April 2020. Because of COVID-19, we are locked down and working from home. Idle hands being the devil's playground (at least in these recent times when I'm not cramming pranking videos on TikTok), it seemed a good time to refresh an ancient article on repurposing old hardware. The original article detailed how to install Linux to make use of those recently obsoleted Pentium systems and make sure the NICs could connect at 100Mbs. At the time it was driven by a passion to learn Linux with whatever tools I had available. 

Today, I'm hoping to address some other issues. First, I needed something to do. Second, the thought of perfectly serviceable hardware sitting in a box irked me. Third, with this downturn, it makes financial sense to make do with existing or refurbished hardware. 

I had picked up a Lenovo 440P from eBay for $100. I didn't absolutely need this laptop, but at that price I could have a dedicated test laptop instead of a VM. After $150 worth of updates to replace the screen and SSD, it was ready for installation. 

I also have original Google Nexus 6 and Pixel phones which have already lost manufacturer support. The hardware is still perfectly serviceable but the Android OS is far behind on security and feature updates. These phones can be purchased for $50-$150 on ebay.

There are millions of school kids that are now, like their parents, working from home. Many schools have adopted Chromebooks which are a lightweight computing device with fairly decent security. As a longtime IT user, I swear by them because I don't want to administer my personal devices. New Chromebooks start at around $200, so even scrounging eBay for old laptops expressly for installing ChromeOS is a hard sell. Luckily, I have several older laptops too slow for even a minimal Linux build but work fine for ChromiumOS, the open source version of ChromeOS.

I won't go into the details of installing each of these because the existing documentation is quite good. I will add a few pointers on my own experiences.

Laptop Installation of Linux

Lenovo laptops are particularly well-suited for Linux installations. They are plentiful on eBay, hardware is easily upgradeable and replaceable, and built for durability. The refurbished 440P I purchased had 8G of RAM, a 500G traditional laptop drive, and a serviceable but scratched, low-density screen. I upgraded the screen to a 1920x1080 panel for $60 and the slower drive to a similar capacity SSD for $90. 

After an hour spent cleaning and replacing the drive and screen, I started a CentOS 8 Linux installation. There are dozens of Linux distributions available for all sorts of purposes. I gravitate to RHEL/CentOS and Linux Mint. Among hundreds of others are Fedora, Ubuntu, ElementaryOS and Kubuntu. 

The 440P supports USB installation. After downloading CentOS8 from their website and writing to an 8GB USB flash drive, I enabled booting from USB in the 440P BIOS. Installation was straightforward and entailed selecting an install type (server, end-user, minimal, etc.), filling in some host details (hostname, users, installation drive, WiFi settings), and so on. The OS installation took about an hour from bootup to login. 

When finished, I had a decent test laptop that could run all my necessary applications. Total spent was about $250 

Cellphone Installation of LineageOS

Unlike Apple's relatively long support timeframe, Google phones only have about 3 years of support which is my biggest annoyance with Google's Android policy. That said, the fact that their phones are open means that I am not tied to their update lifecycle. LineageOS fills the gap by providing an open source Android OS.  

I purchased both the Nexus 6 and Google Pixel phones brand new. They were great devices but I put them in a drawer when later models appeared. Recently, I dusted them off to test out some Blynk apps for an Android project. Unfortunately, because the support had lapsed I did not feel comfortable putting them online. This is where LineageOS came in.

LineageOS is an offshoot of the CyanogenMod project, which also provided an open Android build. They have extremely detailed documentation broken down by phone model and the instructions worked without surprises.

Installation required installing two packages (adb and fastboot) to my laptop. After that, I enabled developer mode on the phones, enabled USB debugging, and rebooted to a recovery state. Then, using adb and fastboot, I pushed the LineageOS recovery image, rebooted once again, then pushed the Lineage OS. Finally, I added a set of Google Apps to both devices. On reboot, it went through the typical setup for WiFi and personalization. 

The only I encountered was that the Nexus 6 battery was barely holding a charge. I ended up ordering a replacement battery for $12 from eBay. Battery replacement was a bit tedious because there were a lot of screws to loosen and replace but not difficult. Except for this, everything else was boring and that's a good thing. These phones can be purchased for $30 to $150 on eBay.

Laptop Installation of ChromiumOS/NeverWare

Before I had purchased that refurbished 440P above, I tried to do the same on an older Dell Inspiron 15" laptop. New, this laptop was about $300 about 3 years ago. With 4G of RAM, a tiny 256G drive, and a low-density screen, it wasn't worth upgrading as the cost of more memory and SSD would be close to a new bargain laptop. 

Neverware

Neverware is similar to LineageOS. It provides a rock-solid free version of ChromeOS that performs well on even dated hardware such as that Inspiron. Again, the project documentation is fairly complete and for the most part, there were few deviations from the installation guide. Now a caveat, NeverWare is a licensed product but there is a free/home version available. I installed this version.

The main issues I encountered was getting the USB installation drive to be visible. Entering the BIOS was needlessly difficult as there seemed to be only a half second when it would recognize the keypress. Once inside the BIOS, I enabled the boot from USB.

Chromium OS

Chromium OS is upstream to ChromeOS, similar to how the Android Open Source Project is upstream to Google's version. (Need to verify). Unlike Neverware, it's a bit ...unpolished. Installation was not atl straightforward and required several tweaks to get working. 

Target machine was another Dell Inspiron but this one had 8G of RAM available. 

My first attempt was to build the Chromium OS from source code. Unfortunately, I ran into dependency issues running from a Linux Mint laptop and ended up just using a pre-compiled package. I did manage to get it working but still working on documenting. Please stay tuned.

Closing Thoughts

I listed some of the goals for this project above. In all honesty, I was getting a bit frantic after the past two weekends of fixing broken USB connectors on my Arduino power supplies. At about $2 for a new module, the cost benefit is hardly justifiable but it gave me something to do. After all is said, I did feel pretty good after seeing these old devices running again and not just in the gee-whiz way when I see an old C64 or Atari 520ST powered on. These are actually useful.

I hope you are all safe and healthy.

Resources

• https://developers.redhat.com/articles/getting-red-hat-developer-subscription-what-rhel-users-need-know/
• https://www.centos.org/download/
• https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
• https://lineageos.org/
• https://www.neverware.com/freedownload#intro-text
• https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os
• https://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/