Revive Old Hardware with Linux

I recently acquired an old Dell Precision T3400 workstation that my company was going to drop off at the local recycling center. It was old and tired, a 2007 model that bore a Windows Vista sticker on it and weighed at least 60 lbs. But overall it was in good shape, it was only being replaced because it still had a slow mechanical hard drive and it wasn’t worth putting more money into a 16 year old computer. But I though it was kind of cool, it used to be a fairly high end computer, which meant that all the parts still worked (aside from the hard drive, which I ditched immediately), and I had been looking for an extra computer I could use to get more familiar with Linux.

Of course I left the Vista sticker on the case.

I settled on installing Linux Mint, and went with the lightest-weight flavor — Xfce — since I preferred better performance over more features. The minimum requirements for Mint Xfce are 2GB RAM, 1GHz dual-core processor, and 30GB free disk space. Very lightweight by modern standards, and much faster than if I had put Windows 10 on this PC. This Dell Precision came with 4GB DDR2 ECC memory, an Intel Core 2 Quad 64-bit processor running just over 1GHz, and a 525 watt 80-plus Bronze power supply with support for running dual graphics cards. 16 years ago, this was an awesome PC to have, and I figure it will keep running for a while longer if I take care of it.

All I had to do was clean out all the spider webs (literally) install a new solid state drive, replace the old VGA graphics card with my old-but-slightly-newer GTX 1050ti, replace the dried-out thermal paste, and remove the ancient 40-pin IDE ribbon cables that must have been meant for hard drive expansion.

Installing Linux directly onto a computer was much easier than I had expected. I had previously only ever used Linux in a virtual machine, and I have to say that setting up Linux in VirtualBox is definitely harder than doing a bare-metal install. First you need to go to the download site:

Linux Mint 21.1 "Vera"

The download may take some time if you have a slow internet connection, otherwise it will only be a few minutes. Then you want to download Rufus if you do not already have it:

Rufus

Now open Rufus and select the Linux ISO from your download folder.

You can leave all of the options set to the default values, but I chose to select “Add fixes for old BIOSes” since I do have an old BIOS and wasn’t sure how the Linux kernel would interact with the aged firmware. It’s also important to make sure the USB drive is in a FAT32 format, since older computers sometimes do not detect a flash drive that is formatted in the newer NTFS standard. I recommend a 16gb flash drive for this, since most flash drives under 32gb in size come already formatted as FAT32.

Select Start and it will take a few minutes for Rufus to create the installation image. Now you can put the USB in the computer where you’ll be installing Linux, start up the computer and enter the BIOS boot menu. The boot menu key for my computer is F12, but yours might be different depending on the motherboard manufacturer.

Now you can select the option to boot to the USB device, and hit enter.

After a minute, you will be greeted by the Linux Mint Grub menu, and you want to select “Start Linux Mint”. It took a couple minutes for my computer to start up Mint, so don’t worry if it looks like your screen has “frozen,” this is normal.

You will now arrive at a bootable Linux Mint image, which you could use similarly to the permanent installation, but we’re here to install it on the machine. Double click the “Install Linux Mint” icon in the top left of the screen to begin the installation process.

IMPORTANT: Installing Linux on your PC will overwrite and delete any data you have on the HDD/SSD. Make sure you do not have any family pictures, tax documents, etc. stored on your drive. There is a way to partition a hard disk to install separate operating systems on it (if the drive is large enough), but I’m not going to go into that here.

Go through all the following prompts. Once all the files have been installed, you will have to restart the PC and remove the USB to boot into your newly-installed operating system. Before customizing Mint, I would recommend connecting to the internet and installing all necessary updates. Use the following commands in the Terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo apt autoremove

You can then install any additional security updates by clicking the shield icon in the bottom right of the screen. Be careful when installing optional updates, such as new drivers for your graphics card. In my case, I installed the “recommended” drivers for my GPU, then rebooted and did not get any output to my monitor. If that happens to you, you can hold down the shift button while rebooting to enter the Grub menu, then find the option to open a terminal as root, where you can uninstall all GPU drivers and reboot. I’ll say it again — use caution when installing new drivers.

You should also use the “passwd” command (without the quotation marks) to change your password. You will also want to go into System Settings to change your device name and username.

That’s it, you’ve successfully revived old hardware or sped up budget hardware, and you’re ready to do anything you want on your new Linux installation. Happy computing!