131–140 of 178 posts
The article just sort of stops. Was the ram upgrade helpful? How was the mouse - was it choppy like in Windows XP as discussed at the top of the article? (And whatever happened to twm, possibly the lightest window manager around?)
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…
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?
The article just sort of stops. Was the ram upgrade helpful? How was the mouse - was it choppy like in Windows XP as discussed at the top of the article? (And whatever happened to twm, possibly the lightest window manager around?)
would love to see twm get active again as well
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).…
I had one of these and loved it, taking it everywhere. I vaguely remember it running some flavor of Linux that was pretty usable at the time. Sometime in 2012 the display started having issues and then it stopped powering on shortly thereafter. I would spend the next decade trying to recreate something resembling the experience through Chromebooks but never really getting there, eventually surrendering to the 13-inch…
However the charging broke and I never got around trying to repair it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Also Alpine Linux (32 bit, the extended edition for better hw) will run faster than Antix.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.