In this video i go over the trade offs on running a node or mining bitcoin with a raspberry pi vs on an older laptop.
I personally think ThinkPads are great for this but old Acer or Dell Chromebooks should work too.
There are a ton of videos on how to get an a chromebook or old laptop running linux.
Once you are running Linux with an "apt package manager" [such as Ubuntu or Linux Mint] everything else should be extremely straight forward and just as easy as a Raspberry Pi. It's also kind of cool that you don't need to buy extra keyboards, monitors or anything like that.
Since the video is just me randomly rambling here are some resources to get you started:
ThinkPad Buyers Guide / How to Pick a Laptop:
[ Ссылка ]
How to Upgrade a Windows Thinkpad to Linux Mint or Ubuntu
[ Ссылка ]
How to Upgrade a Chromebook to Linux Mint or Ubuntu:
[ Ссылка ]
Some alternative lightweight Linux distributions for older laptops:
[ Ссылка ]
Don't be afraid to try one of these out if you have an old computer or laptop laying around somewhere, it will probably work just fine!
--
I personally tried this on a ThinkPad Chromebook 11e and a Thinkpad T460s. The entire process of doing this on the ThinkPad t460s was significantly easier since all I had to do was flash a USB drive with the Ubuntu 22.04 then mash on F12 to boot into the bios and boot from USB. then you just navigate to the desktop and double click on a CD icon to install ubuntu. it should lead you through a wizard with a very nice and easy to use GUI.
I personally erased everything that was on the Thinkpad t460s since I have absolutely no intentions of running Windows on it. if you want to dual boot, i recommend looking at a different guide. I generally do not provide any sort of windows support in my videos since it's not free open source operating system. technically umbrel isn't FOSS but it's super easy to use and gives you nice GUI and is probably not spying on you the way windows is so it's a decent trade off.
In order to remove the write protection screw you need to take the laptop apart a bit. In the video linked below, the guy goes over how to disassemble the whole laptop so you can skip to the relevant portions. Note, he is assembling the windows version. The Chromebook version is a little bit different [no removable ram or HDD] but the process and internal components is largely the same.
Here is the PDF for the chromebook:
[ Ссылка ]
The "Removing and reinstalling the write-protect screw" is on page 22 or simply so a search for "protect screw".
I skipped a couple of steps since my ThinkPad Chromebook 11e didn't have an extra hard drive. Here are the steps i took summarized:
To remove the write-protect screw on a Thinkpad 11E Chromebook do the following:
1: Open the back cover
[ Ссылка ]
2. Remove the battery.
[ Ссылка ]
3. Remove the keyboard.
[ Ссылка ]
5. Remove the keyboard bezel assembly.
[ Ссылка ]
6. Locate the write-protect screw & remove it. (it's on the bottom right)
[ Ссылка ]
7. Reassemble everything.
Note, for some reason, after I did this the laptop wouldn't turn on. or respond despite being plugged into the power source.
I troubleshooted it by reinstalling the write protection screw, seeing if it would turn on (it did) and then removing it again. Not sure what happened but I didn't have any problems after that. It only really takes like 10-15 minutes to take off the screw if you know what you are doing.
After installing Ubuntu or Linux Mint, if you want to mine, you can just open up Terminal and follow these instructions:
[ Ссылка ]
The commands you need to enter are exactly the same.
Install umbrel just run this command in terminal:
curl -L [ Ссылка ] | bash
