There are many articles about laptops becoming desktops, and here is mine. My old laptop was Lenovo G40-45, with the AMD A6-6310 processor, not the best on the line-up but do the job fine at that time, even accompanying me on college, even that time it feel lacking because Windows do this and that. After finishing college the laptop become dormant, because I'm getting a desktop that doesn't need portability. Years come by, and I'm curious how it works today, same sluggish same Windows bloat. When technically I store it with care, the display lamp is dead, the touchpad is dead, and luckily keyboard is still alive, but as long as the machine runs, we gonna plug external mouse and keyboard anyways. I can't see anything then I plugged in an external monitor and somehow the external monitor not receiving a signal until it boot the operating system, maybe not every laptop had that behavior but mine does. So with courage out of nowhere, opened it up take away the display plugged new monitor, then BAMM the external monitor showed bios boot. The easy part is just plugging everything in, external mouse, keyboard, LAN cable, and power brick.
The setup:
- Operating System I'm not using any boot drive, as I'm booting over a network via LTSP project, it really reduces the headache of installing something and another advantage is my settings will persistent with any system that boots over LAN. No hard drive messing, yay.
- Audio I'm using PulseAudio over the network then again saving me from another cable. Technically it is Pipewire on the server side and PulseAudio on the client side.
- A keyboard, mouse, and LAN cable are just some cheap ass you can find in any store.
As long as I can plug these LANs I can boot from any machine I guess.
P.S: This laptop had all plug on the left so it like a desktop when plugged-in.
Here my super low res janky pictures.
sources: https://ltsp.org/ https://www.amd.com/en/support/apu/amd-series-processors/amd-a6-series-apu-for-laptops/a6-6310-radeon-r4-graphics https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/lenovo-g40 https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo_Laptops/Lenovo_G40/Lenovo_G40_Spec.PDF https://www.pcworld.com/article/394822/how-to-turn-your-laptop-into-a-desktop-workstation.html https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Network/
