61–70 of 178 posts
#!/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
Did my whole engineering curriculum as my single computer, ran MATLAB and other JVM GUIs/IDEs on 1GB RAM/Atom N450. The build and display were horrendous, but that was a good companion to take notes during lectures and in the lab.
Similarly, I was hacking on a tiny netbook before I was a professional programmer, everything about it was awful, the keyboard was Norwegian and it was missing some keys, but eventually I managed to build up enough of a portfolio with it that I got my first internship and eventually got hired. Old photo (2013) of it, running Kubuntu (Xubuntu maybe even?) at this point I think: https://i.imgur.com/1NRIZrg.jpeg
These 2008-2010 era netbooks are impossible to use as a desktop. They were already painfully slow when they were new, so much so that OEMs shipped them dual booting a stripped down OS. 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 En…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Do you mean that the titlebar would be off screen so you couldn't move/close the window? https://xkcd.com/1479/ 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…
> Do you mean that the titlebar would be off screen so you couldn't move/close the window? 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,…
I have one of these in a closet and wondered for years about how to turn it in a distraction free word processor/simple digital typewriter. 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 thi…
I would say, you install a lightweight Linux, boot directly into your favorite distraction free editor at full screen and sync the files back to phone and big computer via something like syncthing/Nextcloud/etc. 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 yo…
I tried reviving my Asus Eee PC 1015PEM (1.5GHz dual core, 2GB RAM) and even running Linux Mint was a bit much for it (basic tasks were slow, and Wine had too much overhead for games). I initially tried upgrading the Windows 7 Starter to Windows 10, and while the upgrade did work...it was failing to even log in! Whole thing just seemed stalled.
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
The Community behind the marvelous project as ArchLinux32, are ineffably awesome... The project provide various options, including i496, i696, and pentium4 architectures with or without PAE requirements. The OS comes with pre-configured systemd, and supports numerous up-to-date repositories out-of-the-box. Some relatively lightweight custom window manager like Awesome or i3wm may also shape the environment if X requi…
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"Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re: distraction free writing machine -- another option would be a FreeDOS/SvarDOS-based system: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/04/26/build-your-o... 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 o…
Thanks! This is really really tempting, but I guess this leaves Wi-Fi on the table, right? I want to run it offline, but still be able to sync my writing on-demand when I'm done.
It ran Octoprint for me :)