Repurposing an old, busted laptop

bluestreak0 · 2014-10-22 12:27:49

Hi all,

I recently acquired a Toshiba Tecra M9, a 5-ish year old laptop, with a Core 2 Duo, 2 gigs of ram, 160 gig hard drive, usb 2 etc. It's a business model, so it has intel centrino pro and PXE, I believe.

However, the laptops built in graphics card (NVIDIA Quadro NVS 130M) is broken and most of the time only the displays backlight is on. The chip is soldered onto the motherboard, so the repair is much too expensive.

I have decided to repurpose this laptop, therefore, as a headless server or other machine of some kind not requiring a display (DVI doesn't work either).

This is why I have come here, for some inspiration, and perhaps some guidance from someone who has undertaken a similar challenge (headless installation could be tricky), or one who has experience in this area.

Thanks

Trilby · 2014-10-22 12:41:20

bluestreak0 wrote:

headless installation could be tricky

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_from_SSH

bluestreak0 · 2014-10-22 13:50:55

Thanks Trilby; yes ssh would be the way to go.

However, one needs to enable dhcpcd and sshd first. I guess I'll just have to type them 'blind'.

Thanks again.

tomk · 2014-10-22 14:05:01

Or you could take out the drive, connect it to another machine, install, then put it back in.

nomorewindows · 2014-10-22 15:04:49

You could PXE boot the machine, given it will boot from PXE first in the boot order or (F12 may help). Then from there, you'll have sshd enabled in the PXE client so all you'll have to do is SSH in from another machine (or the machine that is hosting the PXE client).

Arch Linux

#1 2014-10-22 12:27:49

Repurposing an old, busted laptop

#2 2014-10-22 12:41:20

Re: Repurposing an old, busted laptop

#3 2014-10-22 13:50:55

Re: Repurposing an old, busted laptop

#4 2014-10-22 14:05:01

Re: Repurposing an old, busted laptop

#5 2014-10-22 15:04:49

Re: Repurposing an old, busted laptop

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