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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

#141

Post by Nexxxeh »

I loved my Netbook. Acer Aspire One.

The early ~2008 Linux-supplied dirt cheap Acer Aspire One A110L netbooks came with small (8GB?) and horrifically slow SSDs.

Back in the days of such things, we'd upgrade the RAM and use Windows XP with the write filter to make them great little machines. There was an SD card slot in the side that would happily store files.

The SSDs were very limited in read-write cycles from what I remember. More noticeable they brutally slow at writing. By shoving all the writes into RAM instead of direct the SSD, everything ran more smoothly.

If you wanted to keep any changes (usually due to OS or software updates) then you ran a batch file that wrote out the changes to the SSD before shutdown. Otherwise you shut the machine down and all your changes were immediately forgotten.

RAM Upgrade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3WVb1dL--o Enhanced Write Filter: https://www.prime-expert.com/articles/a04/speeding-up-ssd-ba...

It was more than fast enough for the time, the form factor was perfect for my teenage hands (not that they're much bigger now) and it was cheap and small enough to drag everywhere with me. (I copied and pasted some of that from a previous comment of mine about it.)

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

#142

Post by catdog »

internet2000 wrote: post #10
trelane wrote: post #8

I really miss netbooks. They were an amazing moment for Linux. No surprise Microsoft killed them.

Netbooks didn’t need Microsoft’s help in dying. Nobody bought more than one of them, the experience was that bad.

> Netbooks didn’t need Microsoft’s help in dying. Nobody bought more than one of them, the experience was that bad.

If I remember correctly Microsoft put a limit on the HW specs for getting those cheap Windows copies while simultaneously making sure they all shipped with Windows which did not run that well on that low spec hardware. I think this is a huge part why this category died that quickly.

On the other hand there was also just general technological progress happening, "full size" notebooks were generally getting a lot more compact and lightweight so there was less need for that separate category.

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

#143

Post by catdog »

abc42 wrote: post #30
trelane wrote: post #8

I really miss netbooks. They were an amazing moment for Linux. No surprise Microsoft killed them.

https://frame.work/fi/en/laptop12 is kinda close

Except for the price. Apart from portability and battery life a huge factor was them being (very) low cost.

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

#144

Post by spider-mario »

happymellon wrote: post #45
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…

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.

Mine (Acer Aspire One 756) had an EFI disguised as a BIOS. I only discovered it was EFI after a few years, when I inserted some bootable flash drive, opened the boot menu and saw an EFI entry for the flash drive there. Other than that, it’s as if they were trying to keep the EFI a secret (nothing in the settings hinted at it and I couldn’t get it to boot in EFI mode by default).

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

#145

Post by catdog »

trelane wrote: post #15
sublinear wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are netbooks dead? What's the meaningful difference between a netbook and a modern 11-inch laptop?

> What's the meaningful difference between a netbook and a modern 11-inch laptop? Being cheap, commonly available, and shipping with Linux come readily to mind.

Sadly even back in the day mostly some very early models shipped with Linux as Microsoft promptly made sure they don't.

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

#146

Post by sublinear »

trelane wrote: post #15
sublinear wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are netbooks dead? What's the meaningful difference between a netbook and a modern 11-inch laptop?

> What's the meaningful difference between a netbook and a modern 11-inch laptop? Being cheap, commonly available, and shipping with Linux come readily to mind.

I was implying that the answer has to be nostalgia. Ewaste didn't stop being produced some time in the early 2010s. There's always newer ewaste to look at.

You can buy more modern laptops made as recently as 2020 that are at least an order of magnitude better in every single way (even including weight) on Amazon and eBay for about $150 USD. They're lightly used and all hardware is supported without any fuss including the touch screens, etc. They're even cheaper if you buy them in bulk. These are institutional selloffs (schools, offices, government, etc.).

You do have to install Linux yourself though.

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

#148

Post by nickjj »

I like how efficient Arch is, in the sense that you have nothing and now you get to pick and choose what you want.

My main desktop I use for full time software development and video editing is from 2014. I've run Windows on it forever. I put Arch on it ~8 months ago.

A full desktop environment I put together based on niri boots at 1.1 GB of memory. Every app I want is installed (tons of CLI tools, various GUI tools, Docker, video editors, browser, etc.) all together comes in at 10 GB of disk total for everything based on what `df -h` says for my root partition.

My machine does have 16 GB of memory so I'm not pressed for memory, but it's nice to know the machine runs on a system designed to not be bloated.

After switching from Windows 10 Pro, it felt like I got a hardware upgrade. Things open faster and generally speaking everything just feels snappier.

As an aside, it was super fun spending a few days setting everything up in a repeatable way which I've now replicated on a number of systems with https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice.

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

#149

Post by catdog »

I owned a Samsung NC10 which had a non-shitty keyboard as its outstanding feature. Was a nice little Linux machine I used a lot. Only bad thing, those Intel Atom N2xx CPUs are just awfully slow, even back then.

Today realistically I don't think it really makes that much sense to bother with those devices even for small home servers. You can e.g. get used thin clients for cheap which run circles around those old CPUs and support way more RAM while likely being as power efficient if not more. At the bare minimum I would avoid using any 32 bit x86 CPU for running anything modern, even Debian dropped official support for that architecture now.

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

#150

Post by kiddico »

nickjj wrote: post #148

I like how efficient Arch is, in the sense that you have nothing and now you get to pick and choose what you want. My main desktop I use for full time software development and video editing is from 2014. I've run Windows on it forever. I put Arch on it ~8 months ago. A full desktop environment I put together based on niri boots at 1.1 GB of memory. Every app I want is installed (tons of CLI tools, various GUI tools,…

Dotfriedrice is a great repo name
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