I had an HP Mini. It had a weird 1024x600 display panel, and a lot of applications expect you to have at least 1024x768. Sometimes apps would work fine until they opened a modal that was just a bit too tall, and you had to pray that Enter or Escape did something reasonable.
A few years ago I installed Debian, qBittorrent and Samba. I figured it could handle something IO-bound. I ran it for a couple of years and then recycled it when my Internet got faster than the 100 Mbps ethernet card.
A tip if you have one of those laying around and it always ran a 32-bit OS is to check if the CPU is really 32-bit only. Only the very first Atom generation was 32-bit, but the next generations had poor 64-bit driver support on Windows, so OEMs shipped it as a 32-bit machine. Not the case for OP’s netbook, theirs is really 32-bit only.
I used one as a replacement for a "desktop computer" for 7+ years
Here, "desktop" means the form factor not the interface
I used NetBSD as the OS. I never tried to use Windows. It was during this time that I stopped using X11 entirely, i.e., no "desktop" metaphor, no terminal emulator programs, and began staying in VGA textmode 100% of the time
If I needed to view graphics I sent the files to another computer running graphical OS on the LAN but not connected to the internet. At the time, this was mainly an iPad
As a matter of practice I never connected Apple computers to the internet
These ASUS netbooks indeed had a slow processor but the amount I accomplished with this computer was substantial. I created bootable USB sticks that booted to rootfs in RAM and never touched disk, an immutable, custom OS that resembles ChromeOS today, but better (no Chrome or other software written and controlled by an adtrech corporation). I could pull out the stick after boot and use the USB port for something else.^1 NetBSD kernels compiled quickly enough and I did not use QEMU for testing
1. It was perplexing to me to read about the problems people had with SD cards when the RaspberryPi appeared. I pull the SD card out after boot, the OS runs entirely from RAM
I still have this netboook. There is some issue with the power. I have thought about trying to fix it
> A tip if you have one of those laying around and it always ran a 32-bit OS is to check if the CPU is really 32-bit only. Only the very first Atom generation was 32-bit, but the next generations had poor 64-bit driver support on Windows, so OEMs shipped it as a 32-bit machine. Not the case for OP’s netbook, theirs is really 32-bit only.
A lot of netbooks will lock the CPU into 32-bit mode in the BIOS, so getting them to boot a 64-bit OS also requires patching the BIOS. It's doable but has limited benefits when they're limited to 2-4 GB of RAM anyway.
Back in the day there was no real benefit. Today it's different as most Linux distros don't really care much about supporting 32 bit anymore.
On Debian at least, Alt+grab, or the window menu "move" could save your day.
Booting a 32 bit OS was fine, but 64 bit OS' generally came with a 64 bit bootloader, so you had to do a special song and dance to load a 32 bit bootloader with a 64 bit OS.
It was by far my favorite laptop I’ve ever had. I put an SSD in it, though, which made a pretty huge difference.
Run Alpine Linux from RAM. That will consume about 125MB with the standard install. Set up persistence so you save changes. Install a lightweight window manager and use a lightweight browser like qutebrowser.
Even thought Alpine uses musl you can still get apps like Obsidian to run. I can't remember how though but this whole setup was usable on a PC that had a built in 56K modem.
Unfortunately its CMOS battery ran out and when I went in to replace it I had to unplug a few ribbon cables which of course promptly snapped the now-brittle plastic connectors. Its been sitting on a shelf waiting to be revived once again ever since... I miss that little thing.
People talk about modern Microsoft and how much they do for open source have such short memories. Microsoft used to do everything they can to kill open source and even referred to the ecosystem as “communism”.
Not just for obsolete systems, sometimes a full screen application might pick a tiny desktop resolution as well, and not properly restore the resolution, so you could need to deal with a too-big dialog box in that situation as well.
On Linux it's just Alt+drag anywhere on the window to move it.
Or I suppose it could be treated like a CLI only info display panel running an ssh client and the "htop" output from a remote server.
Not a snappy experience even with the light IceWM based desktop but useable and faster than some corporate PCs I've used in educational settings in the past.
[1] antiX strikes me as a lot less work than the OAs hand crafted Arch install but the whole point is you can do what you want with free software. https://antixlinux.com/
Also Alpine Linux (32 bit, the extended edition for better hw) will run faster than Antix.
Do you mean that the titlebar would be off screen so you couldn't move/close the window?
On the Xfce desktop at least there's a nice shortcut, alt+drag with left mouse button to move any window, and alt+drag with right mouse button to resize it. That's honestly the Linux thing I miss most when using any other OS.
Not just the title bar, but often also e.g. half of the settings and the Cancel/Save/Ok buttons.
Basically the screen was 600 pixels in height, but the modal was designed after 2005 so it was 768 pixels tall, and you would get a cropped modal missing maybe 10% top and 10% bottom pixels that you couldn't interact with via mouse, and you couldn't resize nor move (either because it was fixed size, or because all corners that would allow you to do so were off-screen).
Mostly, yes. I had an acer aspire one d250 (similar specs to that in the article) and i worked mostly okay under linux for light development work, meaning i was in high school doing java development with emacs and running apache ant by hand.
Other than that yeah they were painfully slow.
Also i bought a similar machine at a flea market for like 20€ and was sorely disappointed to find out it had a Broadcom wifi chip which is a pain to work with and i’m not really interested in buying an atheros card for another 20€.
The external network card support was better than macbooks' though. Go figure.
Not really. Proper laptops had intel centrino wifi which worked decently well with binary blobs and atheros cards needed no binary blob at all and worked out of the box.
For the web I use DIllo and a custom build of Otter Browser against the older QT5 Webkit engine.
For web media I use streamlink and yt-dlp.
My main desktop I use for full time software development and video editing is from 2014. I've run Windows on it forever. I put Arch on it ~8 months ago.
A full desktop environment I put together based on niri boots at 1.1 GB of memory. Every app I want is installed (tons of CLI tools, various GUI tools, Docker, video editors, browser, etc.) all together comes in at 10 GB of disk total for everything based on what `df -h` says for my root partition.
My machine does have 16 GB of memory so I'm not pressed for memory, but it's nice to know the machine runs on a system designed to not be bloated.
After switching from Windows 10 Pro, it felt like I got a hardware upgrade. Things open faster and generally speaking everything just feels snappier.
As an aside, it was super fun spending a few days setting everything up in a repeatable way which I've now replicated on a number of systems with https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice.
My main machine is a 13 year old Lenovo y510p running Debian and KDE. You'd be hard-pressed to tell that it's anywhere near that age.
The only aspect that has been annoying with both is graphics. Both machines are nvidia and are long past their support periods. The y510p has SLI (one graphics card is in the CD drive slot) which never worked on Linux. When removing the second card, the on-processor Intel graphics can be used, which have better support than nvidia, so I stick with that. I don't do anything graphics intensive anyway.
The biggest upgrade with old computers, without any doubt, is an SSD. I still remember getting my first one back in about 2011, a used 60GiB OCZ Vertex, and it was truly magic seeing the computer boot to the desktop in a few seconds even on a core 2 duo.
As now, there is a very wide performance profile for machines around then. From sub Ghz Celerons up to 3Ghz plus dual core things.
We moved house recently and I found it in a box when I was unpacking. Maybe I should find a use for it
Perfectly adequate for most web dev, scripting, blogging, chatting, network stuff, remote systems administration, etc.
The old netbooks took handling less carefully much more well than anything now other than probably an Apple laptop (I mean, if it fell, odds are it wouldn't break as easily; the ones with hard drives, maybe not as well, but it took more than once; talking the screen and keyboard).
I imagine this is why you liked it. Easy to backpack with.
They were also great for running out for coffee and working without schlepping a full-sized laptop.
I mean the ones with hard drives, not the ones with teeny tiny ssd's. Hard to do much on those, and slower.
Is crunchbang still around?
I'd look at antiX for reviving a netbook if limited to 32 bit.
Today realistically I don't think it really makes that much sense to bother with those devices even for small home servers. You can e.g. get used thin clients for cheap which run circles around those old CPUs and support way more RAM while likely being as power efficient if not more. At the bare minimum I would avoid using any 32 bit x86 CPU for running anything modern, even Debian dropped official support for that architecture now.
The early ~2008 Linux-supplied dirt cheap Acer Aspire One A110L netbooks came with small (8GB?) and horrifically slow SSDs.
Back in the days of such things, we'd upgrade the RAM and use Windows XP with the write filter to make them great little machines. There was an SD card slot in the side that would happily store files.
The SSDs were very limited in read-write cycles from what I remember. More noticeable they brutally slow at writing. By shoving all the writes into RAM instead of direct the SSD, everything ran more smoothly.
If you wanted to keep any changes (usually due to OS or software updates) then you ran a batch file that wrote out the changes to the SSD before shutdown. Otherwise you shut the machine down and all your changes were immediately forgotten.
RAM Upgrade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3WVb1dL--o Enhanced Write Filter: https://www.prime-expert.com/articles/a04/speeding-up-ssd-ba...
It was more than fast enough for the time, the form factor was perfect for my teenage hands (not that they're much bigger now) and it was cheap and small enough to drag everywhere with me. (I copied and pasted some of that from a previous comment of mine about it.)
https://github.com/parksb/parksb.github.io-comments/issues/2...
Sounds like it started on XP running poorly, and ended on Arch... running poorly.
Recently retired my pc with fx6300 because it take too much desktop space; and just setup a mini pc with j6412, also installed arch Linux, i3wm for desktop stuffs
Also find a old usb Bluetooth receiver make it play some music
It works great and use this new setup to get a Agent free experience
I am running agents on my ten year old ThinkPad T460. I gave them their own user account, to limit blast radius, but I haven't had any issues with them nuking things yet. (Except for my code quality...)
Well, maybe my API keys with $5 credit have been exfiltrated though. The world may never know :)
As others have mentioned, the RAM is really low for a desktop but perfectly fine for running a FTP/File/PiHole etc and are usually more powerful than a RaspberryPi.
They also have multiple USB A ports if you want to add storage, ethernet etc.
As far as cheap, low-spec, disposable laptops go, Chromebooks are the spiritual successor to netbooks.
If I remember correctly Microsoft put a limit on the HW specs for getting those cheap Windows copies while simultaneously making sure they all shipped with Windows which did not run that well on that low spec hardware. I think this is a huge part why this category died that quickly.
On the other hand there was also just general technological progress happening, "full size" notebooks were generally getting a lot more compact and lightweight so there was less need for that separate category.
Amazing how many of Microsoft's competitors don't need the help, yet receive it.
> Nobody bought more than one of them, the experience was that bad.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/netbook-sales-exploded-i...
"The market for small and cheap laptops -- netbooks -- boomed in 2008, with almost 15 million of the things sold globally."
On the contrary, they were incredibly popular.
This is directly contradicted by the existence of Netbook fans.
Netbooks are almost unique in tech history in how flash-in-the-pan they were. Crypto somehow had more staying power.
Most people fall for marketing, do no deep research or consideration of their needs, and have a piss-poor time.
But some did the reading: Ubuntu on the Dell Mini 9, for example, was a dreamboat!, with or without touchscreen mod.
You could get a much more powerful system for a lot less.
What's the meaningful difference between a netbook and a modern 11-inch laptop?
Being cheap, commonly available, and shipping with Linux come readily to mind.
You can buy more modern laptops made as recently as 2020 that are at least an order of magnitude better in every single way (even including weight) on Amazon and eBay for about $150 USD. They're lightly used and all hardware is supported without any fuss including the touch screens, etc. They're even cheaper if you buy them in bulk. These are institutional selloffs (schools, offices, government, etc.).
You do have to install Linux yourself though.
However the charging broke and I never got around trying to repair it.
The only serious contender in that category now IMO is Chuwi Minibook X.
Always loved the netbook form factor, and they were cheap!
Funny thing is that probably I also have some 2GB DDR2 stick somewhere. Last thing I need to check for is the battery, I presume it is completely down after all those years.
Anyway, this article will be very handy for this side project. Thank you!
No kidding. Lots of fun to see a system actually boot in about 1 second.
That aside, I've installed all kinds of systems on my trusty 2009 Dell Mini 9, a fanless netbook. For years, this was a CLI-only Tiny Core Linux system, currently running SvarDOS. While on Linux, I even used it to live record 1,5-hour long radio shows via an old Mbox2 audio interface and some CLI recording software. Created a huge ramdisk just in case, but everything went well. Netbooks are weird and interesting machines.
I want to run it offline, but still be able to sync my writing on-demand when I'm done.
As for which editor that is, it depends a little bit on your needs, but there are ones specifically geared towards being distraction free like https://ghostwriter.kde.org/
Although markdown may not be what you're after. I personally consider formatting another form of distraction, ao this would be a plus for me. But if you write math-heavy papers, going with something else like Typst or LATeX may be a better choice.
There was also a EeePC specific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EasyPeasy which was even better.
Since then I have installed various things for amusement, including a cut down Chromebook OS and the OLPC Linux. The limit was always the tiny root partition (4GB SSD). I had some limited success joining with the second SSD (16GB) using btrfs.
I think the albeit tiny SSD was this machine's saving grace compared to HDD models, in terms of speed.
I would look at swapping out the HDD for something solid state - lighter, less power, higher performance for random R/W.
Then it's just a case of lightening the load of the CPU as much as possible, strip out everything that is not needed.
I've run modern Firefox on much lighter devices. One of my netbooks is the same spec as this, and I do browsing + coding on it easily.
They came out in 2008, were sold until 2010, had literally less performance than a 2000 Pentium III CPU, were lauded from pundits left and right, and probably the school/hand-me-down laptops of that age (like today's e-waste class Chromebooks).
Especially when Acer and whatever had proper laptops with proper Intel SU-class CPUs and 3-4 GB RAM for the same price.
I disliked these "netbooks" back then and still do, and all that followed its footsteps, including the "laptop"-lookalikes with 32 GB e-MMC storage some mobile carriers would give out with their plans.
It's a disrespectful destitute class of computing.
I know that the Raspberry Pis came out later, but a Raspberry Pi 2 is a hundred times better engineered and well-rounded product, that will also run a desktop better than these netbooks (or at all).
On a related note, I also have colleagues at work who will run only sub-200 dollar smartphones and enjoy living the proper Nigeria/Bangladesh experience from 1-2 years ago. I also know that they don't use heating at home, and do everything in the name of efficiency.
I used to carry one in my toolbox when I worked as a network field tech.
I'd argue my quality of life is higher for using only hand-me-down phones (current one is ~8yo, thanks to LineageOS) because when I'm feeling dysregulated I run out of phone-based distractions really quickly (I don't allow JavaScript, and I don't install any games). I'm healthier for walking and cycling everywhere within ~16km of home (privileged to live in the city, as expensive as it has become, but I'd still do it if I lived further out), and for using heating & cooling only to take the edge off the outside temperature (16C in the winter, 26C in the summer), mindful of where all this energy comes from, what the effects are at scale, and the quality of life of future generations long after I'm dead. I don't do all this for efficiency, but for effectiveness (that of my body, my default mobility and data-processing machine) and consuming a reasonable amount of energy rather than one that, at scale, will burn my house down.
Regarding not-yet e-waste, some people just like tinkering, and the challenge of getting old hardware to still function as a useful tool.
I also understand the reaction to other people's "nonsense"; I sometimes go there, too, and it's an ongoing effort to reel it back to what I can reasonably control.
Is it helpful to have all this spelled out for you?
They pioneered the netbook with the EeePC line.
Sadly, they didn't keep it alive.
The author doesn't explain why but I'm guessing this is because `/tmp` is filling up. Setting a quota on this mount point would help limit the impact that badly behaving programs might have on RAM usage.
The challenges came from tracking down working Wi-Fi drivers for the proprietary hardware and updating the BIOS, since the stock version has a bug where it emits lid close events that Windows XP ignores but Linux dutifully handles.
In addition to the usual suspects (aging hardware, planned obsolescence, bad memories), I wonder how much CPU is burned by software trying to talk to long dead backends and the retry loops and errors that occur as a result.
It works decently, is sufficient for ssh-ing into other hosts. Though web browsing is a pain. I used to mostly use Dillo and elinks, MPV+yt-dlp for videos.
Unfortunately I left it sit for a bit too long and the battery is dead now. I'm thinking of fixing it and upgrading the power port to USB-C. Sometimes I also think about building a compute module-based motherboard for it.
There were interesting bits in the setup (blacklisting defective RAM addresses for instance), maybe I should make a short writeup :)
Though, I don't want to hate on it per se, we all had to start somewhere.
After trying dozens of lightweight Linuxes with disappointing results, I downgraded my Sony Vaio P to WinXP. This has full GPU acceleration on Intel Pouslbo and for XP the machine's 2GB of RAM is spacious. Sad, but there we are.
Instead of Mint I'd pick something like Alpine Linux with LXQT:
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/LXQt
Also, adding ZRAM will fly on that machine.
Also, you can build SCUMMVM (install alpine-sdk, get the alpine ports and edit the pkg build file so scummvm gets compiled with these options at the configure build stage:
#!/bin/sh
sh configure \
--enable-static \
--enable-all-engines \
--enable-all-unstable-engines \
--enable-release \
--enable-plugins \
--disable-hq-scalers \
--disable-dlc \
--disable-scummvmdlc \
--disable-discord
It ran Octoprint for me :)
You could try to install a stripped-down OpenBSD but you'll find very little help if something doesn't work. "You didn't install the full OS, you're on your own" is the response you'd be most likely to get.
Is it just me or did it end on a cliffhanger? That's the last line!
#!/bin/sh
modprobe zram
if [ -e /dev/zram0 ]
then
echo "zram0 on"
exit 1
fi
zramctl --find --size 512M
mkswap /dev/zram0
swapon -p 99 /dev/zram0
While most things ran absolutely fine, Firefox ran like crap, which really makes you realise how awful the modern web is.
When I got the netbook I had dreams of hacking in Emacs wherever I went. The tiny keyboard makes that quite uncomfortable, though. So it was only really used as a music player and web browser while traveling a few times, basically what you'd use a phone for today.
In the early/mid 2000s, we used to buy computers, install Linux and then ask Dell etc. to refund the Windows license, which often worked.
My girlfriend at the time got a Dell desktop really cheap that way. IIRC it cost something like 400 or 500 Euro and Dell refunded ~100 Euro for not using the Windows license. I never really understood the economics, because installing Windows was probably profitable for them due to the adware shipped with Windows.
Probably it was easier/better for them to just give a refund to noisy Linux users than to admit that they were making big bucks on all the crap shipped with the Windows installation.
As an aside, at the time a lot of HP laptops could be purchased with FreeDOS and I think Lenovo was similar.
Apparently, I do still have a few photos in backups of someone's own enchanted marvel of a portal to universes powered by a Celeron D, USB pen-drive of 16 GiB, a single RAM of 1 GiB, we all managed to acquire and built, for such a short time we had!
Preview of the device: https://imgur.com/gallery/h1tWKp3
Since the CPU had no physical address extension (PAE) to electrify a more common OS, and something customary was required for the limited resources, where we chose ArchLinux 32-bit (now ArchLinux32, indeed) and arranged a custom AwesomeWM environment visually suggesting a console design just for it!
And dear... we adventured a few nights back then backed by this machine and some self-compiled emulation software, ZSnes and Gens, for the titles she had collected from a few local stores and magazines!
It was quite long ago... more than a decade and half... but it like all happened just yesterday, and how freaking awesome it was!
You likely had a similar event/memory! Please do remember these...
Related: https://www.archlinux32.org/architecture/ (The below table lists the compatibility of CPUs (identified by their available flags) with architectures...)
The mobo on the pictures is a Socket AM2/2+ one, for AMD processors.
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-m2n-mx-se-plus-r...
PCSX-PGXP runs really well too, forget PGXP on that machine but at low resolution games will run fine with a simple bilinear filter. Parasiteve Eve can be damn addictive ;)
Also, text adventure games; a good one with a great history such Tristam Island it's fine too.
Also, compile Scummvm with these options from git (pacman -S scummvm, check the dependencies; run pacman -R scummvm later), then compile it with these options:
#!/bin/sh
export CC="clang"
export CXX="clang++"
export CXXFLAGS="-fpermissive -fcommon"
export LDFLAGS="-Wl,-z,muldefs"
export LANG=C
make clean -j4
env CC="clang" CXX="clang++" sh configure \
--enable-static \
--enable-all-engines \
--enable-all-unstable-engines \
--enable-release \
--enable-plugins \
--disable-hq-scalers \
--disable-dlc \
--disable-scummvmdlc \
--disable-discord
make CC="ccache clang" CXX="ccache clang++" LDFLAGS+="-Wl,-z,muldefs"