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Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

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

#121

Post by antihero »

stasiu wrote: 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…

Ahh, I started my freelance career on a Portege R100 running Arch back in the day. The amount of times I missed meetings because of X11 failing to run or wpa_supplicant shitting the bed...

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

#122

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

"These 2008-2010 era netbooks are impossible to use as a desktop."

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

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

#123

Post by aapoalas »

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…

I had an HP Mini 5102 and I absolutely loved it! I actually revived it a few years ago and used it for some modern programming tasks. I think I tried to compile rustc on it once and had to leave it on for the night, coming back to it in the morning and finding that it had just frozen fully.

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.

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

#124

Post by lynguist »

I don't understand the unwarranted and ongoing care and enthusiasm for this category of e-waste that was forcibly put upon us.

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.

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

#125

Post by nunez »

Not directly related to the article, but I've got to give it up to Tesla for continuing to eek out every last ounce of performance from the Atoms they used for 2018-2021 Model 3 car computers. They still push updates to the UI for these cars nine years later, albeit with some stuff feature flagged out.

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

#126

Post by nunez »

lynguist wrote: post #124

I don't understand the unwarranted and ongoing care and enthusiasm for this category of e-waste that was forcibly put upon us. 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 lap…

If you needed a cheap, light laptop at the time, this was your only option. The MacBook Air came out two years later.

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

#127

Post by hamper653 »

lynguist wrote: post #124

I don't understand the unwarranted and ongoing care and enthusiasm for this category of e-waste that was forcibly put upon us. 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 lap…

It was cheap, small and light.

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

#128

Post by greggsy »

lynguist wrote: post #124

I don't understand the unwarranted and ongoing care and enthusiasm for this category of e-waste that was forcibly put upon us. 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 lap…

The eee-pc was amazingly attractive in a time when laptops were heavy.

I used to carry one in my toolbox when I worked as a network field tech.

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

#129

Post by 2b3a51 »

walrus01 wrote: post #93
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…

The best possible use I can think of for one is disassembled and with just the screen and motherboard, running something like a full screen browser that auto refreshes a certain web page like the weather. With 1 gig of ram even the most minimal lxde or similar desktop environment is going to struggle to run a full size chromium or Firefox for anything more than one tab of browser content. Or I suppose it could be tre…

I'm posting this off a 2009 Samsung NC10 Netbook running antiX linux 26[1] (32 bit, debian Trixie packages but an older 5.10 series kernel) and it has Abiword running, with ROXterm and Firefox with BBC News in the other tab. The netbook has a mechanical hard drive and a gig of ram and a small but not outrageous keyboard. It jogs along OK. I dug it out of the cupboard when I saw this post.

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/

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

#130

Post by 2b3a51 »

jambalaya8 wrote: post #95
iammjm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too had it and remember it fondly, it got me through my studies. Very portable machine. I eventually swapped it for a thinkpad which I loved even more. Now I’m with a MacBook Air for the time being, but I think I’ll get another thinkpad when the time comes

I miss the form factor of the old netbooks. The 2gb swappable to generally up to 4gb ram was really never great, though was fine with linux as long as you set your swap partition up correctly, though I wouldn't be expecting much in the way of running things like virtualbox or any modern IDE. The 32bit support only was fine then, not now (and with only 2-4gb ram, you didn't want 64bit anyway). Perfectly adequate for m…

No, the project leader (corenomial?) packed it in. BunsenLabs is one follow on project and the other is CrunchBang++. Alas both I think are 64 bit only in recent versions because they are based on Debian, which from Trixie (v13 on) is 64 bit only for installation.

I'd look at antiX for reviving a netbook if limited to 32 bit.

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