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It's cool to see your interest in running Linux on highly constrained systems. I might check out eXe Linux, since I spent a bit of time messing with Linux on my Cr-48 Chromebook, which has an Atom N455.

Although, if I'm getting silly enough to try making N455 usable (which was seriously underpowered even at launch), I'm probably going full-on tinkerer mode, which is why I used it as an excuse to learn about Arch Linux. I figured hey, if I only have 2GB RAM and slow 16GB storage, I should have assurance that every single component on the machine is something I opted into installing. Problem is, I can't retain knowledge of the ins and outs of my fully custom environment unless I'm daily driving it, which...how exactly could I daily drive an N455 for anything, other than it being a thin client?

Here's my own blog post covering Arch Linux on the Cr-48: https://dansalva.to/resurrecting-a-prototype-chromebook-with...

Note that since my writing of that post, i915 graphics support in Wayland has been fixed, so it's now viable to run a Wayland DE if desired.

by initramfs1 hours ago|

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That's great information. I had no idea Chromebook prototypes started as early as N455, but since you're skilled with Arch, I'll recommend two distros(one isn't really a distro, but a toolkit) for your cr-48 : Tiny Core Linux, and NanoLinux. The latter is built on TCL and a distro was released on Sourcefourge around 2015- no releases since..

One could really optimize an N450 using a very light package manager over TCL, although it's possible you already have something like that on Arch. With TCL, more assembly is required.

I also used SliTaz on an EeePc 701 back in the day, and I used it more because it had out of the box wifi support. https://slitaz.org/en/ At just 30MB, quite unbeatable. The OS gets some updates still, but it's a smaller project and probably less known. I suppose you could also try Damn Small Linux 2024: https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/2024-download.html

Edit: I added some notes on my tests here, and found the codec that is supported on the N450: MPEG-2: https://github.com/hatonthecat/linux_distro_tests#exegnulinu...

https://youtu.be/jMUeePXx8Ek?is=d938n8NobjBjoOlc

What makes the N450 tolerable over the Celeron 630 and even N270 is that it has hyperthreading, so it's like a dual core computer in some cases, but technically single core. It's not as fast as the AMD C-50 (with better GPU and out of order instructions, but fast enough for very light weight applications.)

Admittedly, I don't use it as a daily driver and only test it when there's a lightweight distro I want to check. Knowing i915 supports Wayland makes me want to test it again

(The AMD FX series did something like this, saying their FX 8350 was 8 cores, but it was really 2-4 physical cores and 8 logical cores): https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ngnwp7/did_the_amd_fx_... (I have an FX-8320E, and it's not super slow though-quite fast in fact)

by zahlman6 hours ago|

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> and it had issues crashing on browsers under even a couple tabs.

Surely this has way more to do with the browser (and the website!) than the OS, nowadays.

by hnarn4 hours ago|

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The memory requirements, yes. The crashing, no. The OS should not crash because memory is running out, but the solution is far from obvious or standardized. My recommendation for RAM constrained systems would be to use zswap combined with a generous amount of swap space.

by initramfs5 hours ago|

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true, and I think some pre-2015 machines might not have anticipated the diverse, but unpredictable ecosystem that 800 lb browsers allow under their hood these days. :)