Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

parksb.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 178 posts

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

#111

Post by internet2000 »

trelane wrote: post #80
tmp10423288442 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they seemed like a good idea - they were really cheap, and had decent battery life for the time - but the compromises were such that you really wouldn’t want to buy another netbook if you could. After the first few releases, the MacBook Air became what the non-cheapskate buyers of netbooks wanted.

> compromises were such that you really wouldn’t want to buy another netbook if you could. This is directly contradicted by the existence of Netbook fans.

How many of those are there? How many compared to the 15 million (mostly) first-and-only-time buyers?

Netbooks are almost unique in tech history in how flash-in-the-pan they were. Crypto somehow had more staying power.

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

#113

Post by ramgine »

embedding-shape wrote: post #54
ezst wrote: post #32

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

Unrelated to your post (I missed those form factors) but has imgur become enshittified too? If I try to zoom in on your picture it gives me a popup I can’t clear telling me to install the app. Sad.

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

#114

Post by ndiddy »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #16

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…

Another thing to keep in mind if you have an old netbook lying around is that a lot of the later models that came out after Windows 7 have PowerVR graphics (rebranded as "Intel GMA 3600") instead of the basic Intel chipset graphics. The only operating systems that will work with the GMA 3600 are 32-bit Windows 7 and whatever version of Fedora was current in 2012 (thanks to a closed source beta driver Intel released).

> 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.

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

#115

Post by 93n »

I still run, and am writing this from, a 16-or-17 year old Dell E6510 (i5-540) that serves as my "around the house" computer. The battery life (with a huge 9 cell that protrudes out the back) isn't great, and it's hot and heavy, but with 8GiB of RAM and an SSD it works pretty well on Trixie with Cinnamon.

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.

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

#116

Post by anthk »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #94
drdexebtjl wrote: post #16

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…

After playing around with old spec hardware I would say before OP gives up try installing Alpine Linux. 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…

Otter-browser will compile fine too.

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

#117

Post by znpy »

jambalaya8 wrote: post #105
znpy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> The default wifi in almost all of the laptops and netbooks of the time sucked. It wasn't unique to netbooks.

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.

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

#118

Post by wildzzz »

jambalaya8 wrote: post #105
znpy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

ndiswrapper was the bane of my existence.

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

#119

Post by alexpotato »

One use of these old laptop/netbooks is to have an always on server that can even survive a power outage of a couple hours (due to the onboard battery).

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.

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

#120

Post by zenoprax »

> On this netbook, which has 1GB of RAM, if you keep the swap partition small you will run into “No space left on device” errors all the time.

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.

Post reply on HN