A few years ago, my wife came home from work with an old IBM/Lenovo T61p laptop that had was being given away as it was end of life. After telling her it wasn’t really worth the effort of lugging it home, It was duly filed and forgotten about.
Fast-forward to recent times and the Mac mini that was running Roon Core died; an iMac was pressed into temporary service.
So yesterday, I found the T61p, and put Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS on it, spent a few happy hours trying to find and install ffmpeg (finally discovering the snappy package manager) and installed Roon Server.
I little final tinkering to install ssh and stopping it from suspending when the lid is closed and hey presto, a new dedicated Roon Core.
It all works beautifully, I’m seeing a processing speed of 55x with some light DSP in my study as I write this.
I am reminded of the quote:
"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry” - Henry Petroski.
But in this case, I’m so glad that the roon bucks the trend and has breathed new life into this old hardware.