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Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

parksb.github.io

101–110 of 178 posts

Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It had a weird 1024x600 display panel, and a lot of applications expect you to have at least 1024x768 On Debian at least, Alt+grab, or the window menu "move" could save your day.

I wonder if that still works on Wayland WMs

It's a nice thing so probably not

Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

#102
post #23

This brings back memories. I loved my Asus Eee PC 1215p. Bought it with my own money. It was the computer I had when I was moving out of my parental home when I was 20 y/o. When I moved out I had Ubuntu installed on it, but in my student room I realised I had issues with connecting to the internet somehow. Went back to my moms and installed back Windows 7, with the Windows 98 look-and-feel-setting which was a built i…

I used my eee PC for my final year project in college. How I didn't get rsi on that keyboard I'll never know.

We moved house recently and I found it in a box when I was unpacking. Maybe I should find a use for it

Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

#103

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…

There was also the scenario where the CPU was 64 bit but the EFI was 32 bit. 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.

Forgot about this. That was annoying.

Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

#104
post #98

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…

When you have a dialog window too big for the screen, you can Alt+Space to open the system menu, then activate the Move menu item, then you can use arrow keys to move the window around, even with the title bar out of bounds. 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…

> When you have a dialog window too big for the screen, you can Alt+Space to open the system menu, then activate the Move menu item, then you can use arrow keys to move the window around, even with the title bar out of bounds.

On Linux it's just Alt+drag anywhere on the window to move it.

Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

#105
post #79

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…

> They were already painfully slow when they were new 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…

The default wifi in almost all of the laptops and netbooks of the time sucked. It wasn't unique to netbooks. Especially for linux (I don't mean only not supporting promiscuous mode if you were in need of network troubleshooting tools; I mean many drivers weren't supported out of the box. If you forgot to download a driver rpm/deb file before installing, good luck. Etc.)

The external network card support was better than macbooks' though. Go figure.

Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

#106
post #52

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.

Mint is too big for something like this. You should go for something lighter weight like Alpine or NetBSD.

Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

#107
post #67
post #52

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.

For games Mednafen and PCSXR do wonders; and SCummvm itself supports tons of graphical and text adventures (even modern ones such as Technobabylon) and tons of source ports (and recompilations such as Super Mario 64) will run fine with just the bundled GL 2.1 adapter. 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…

Zswap is better than ZRAM for this use case. ZRAM is only really interesting in situations where you don't want any swap to disk, like when running on an SD card or something.

Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

#108
> I did not expect much, and because the bottlenecks were the HDD and CPU I did not feel any noticeable performance improvement. Still, it occurred to me that it might be fun to take the netbook completely apart and start replacing its hardware piece by piece.

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.

Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

#109
> I could not remember whether the machine had gotten even slower, or whether it had always been like this and I had once thought even this was fast.

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.

Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

#110
post #35

I would still be using my 1000HE if the mouse and power buttons hadn’t stopped working (would have put an ssd in it then). Sure the keyboard keys are a bit wobbly but otherwise I really loved that machine. Nice form factor. Would love to be able to get a new 400$-ish 10-11” netbook with 6+ hour battery that would fly with some minimal Linux. Recommendations?

Compromise a little bit on the size (but not much, considering bezels!) and $~400 gets you a 100x better computer https://www.ebay.com/itm/145639218896
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