Is it worth trying to revive an old Intel Galileo board?

I dragged one of these out of a drawer a couple of years back and got it talking, so I can tell you what worked. The catch is that the Galileo only ever worked with a very old version of the Arduino IDE, somewhere around the 1.5 and early 1.6 era. Modern versions dropped support ages ago. You can still find those old installers on the Arduino archived downloads page if you dig around on their site, though a lot of third party mirrors are dead like you found.

The other wrinkle is that the board runs its own Linux image off an SD card. Out of the box it does basic Arduino sketch stuff, but a lot of the features people actually liked about it need that boot image, and tracking down a copy that still works is its own little treasure hunt. Even when I had everything set up, the board was slow and clunky compared to anything current. It was neat for about an afternoon, then it went back in the drawer.

One thing in your favor is that yours is sealed and unused. Around here that counts for more than a working but beaten up board does, since there were two versions and the second one in particular has a small following among people who collect this era of Intel kit. Leaving it in the bag and the box probably does more for it than any project whould. If you just want to tinker, a modern board will do circles around it for a fraction of the hassle. Old IDE versions can be cranky about running on current operating systems anyway, so expect some friction even if you find everything. But the SparkFun getting started guide is still up and walks through the basics, so if curiosity wins, that is the best roadmap I found.

My honest take after going through the whole process myself is that the fun is in the unearthing, not the using. Yours being unopened makes it a nicer shelf piece than mine ever was.

Following this becasue I ended up in a similar spot last year with a box of my dad's old electronics gear. Mine was just a basic Uno clone though, so I dodged the whole outdated software problem and it just worked with the current tools. Kind of makes me realise how lucky I got. One thing I wondered reading this, does the board actually show up when you plug it into a computer, or is it just the power light? Might be worth checking before deciding it's shelf material, since a dead USB port would change the answer either way. I'm new here so no idea if that's a silly question.

I had a rough time getting a similar older piece of hardware running years ago, mostly because I couldn't get a stable connection between the board and my computer. For me, the one thing that really made the difference was switching to a specific USB to serial adapter. It had much cleaner drivers than the generic ones I started with, which meant I could actually see the data flow instead of just getting random crashes. If you manage to get the software enviroment going, remember that the Linux image is probably your best bet for actually using the board outside of basic Arduino sketching.

Update: so the reply about needing the old 1.5 era Arduino IDE got cut off right where it looked like you were about to say where to actually find that version now. Was it an archive site or somewhere official? Also wondering, the ftdi adapter tip from the third reply, does that apply here or is the Galileo's port fine on its own?