Daniel Nashed's Blog

Intel MacBook from 2008 runs Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with Domino on Docker

I have an old Intel Mac. Apple MacBook (Late 2008) — the first unibody MacBook.
MacOS support is long expired and the hardware isn't great from today's view.
But it runs Ubuntu perfectly. I just booted it from an USB stick -- haha even it has a DVD drive.

The CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo P7350

• 2 cores / 2 threads
• 2.0 GHz
• 64-bit x86_64
• ISA level: x86-64-v1
   

The machine only has 4 GB of RAM but booted from a USB 2.0 stick the Domino Docker build took just 20 Minutes! That was quicker than expected!

x86-64-v1 is a bit of  problem with some applications.
Current Redhat versions don't run -- Also in a container.
But Ubuntu works just fine.It just takes a while to install.

Watching a container built shows what needs more current CPUs to perform well.
Some software is built with -march=x86-64-v2 is not working

Even Domino isn't compiled this way I got only Domino 12.0.2 working.
Domino 14.x returns and error:

/opt/hcl/domino/notes/latest/linux/server: CPU ISA level is lower than required

The machine isn't really intended to run Domino and making use of the older hardware is mostly to learn what breaks and what still works.
And it could be a simple machine running Ubuntu. Not Domino. I have sufficient other hardware to run Domino.
Also the NVIDIA card is an older architecture which will not work for AI applications.

Running with ZFS would not be a good idea either. It needs RAM and it would need hardware SHA acceleration to be quick.
That's why I didn't try to install it with ZFS. But ext4 works just fine. The USB stick had ZFS.
USB 2.0 is pretty slow. The local HDD provides better performance.

The machine is still working well with Linux in general as long it's Ubuntu. The drivers all work including WLAN if you load the right driver.


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Hostname      :      nsh-MacBook
Linux OS      :      Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS
Linux Version :      24.04.3 LTS (Noble Numbat)
Kernel        :      6.14.0-37-generic
GNU libc      :      2.39
Timezone      :      CET +0100
Locale        :      en_US.UTF-8

Virt          :      none
Docker        :      29.2.0
DomDownload   :      1.1.2
DominoCtl     :      1.5.3

CPU Info      :      2 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P7350 @ 2.00GHz
CPU MHz       :      1989.957
CPU Cache     :      3072 KB

Linux Uptime  :      0 day, 0 hour 24 min
Load Average  :      2.11  2.07  1.48

MemTotal      :       3.6 GB
MemAvailable  :       2.3 GB  (64.2 %)
MemCached     :       2.2 GB  (62.3 %)
MemFree       :       0.1 GB  ( 4.2 %)


Type       Size     Used    Avail  Use%   FsType   Disk                 Mounted on

Root       292G      19G     259G    7%   ext4     /dev/sda2            /
Local      292G      19G     259G    7%   ext4     /dev/sda2            /

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