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Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

parksb.github.io

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

#41

Post by tmp10423288442 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #39
all2 wrote: post #36

My current laptop is a 15 year old freebie from work. It does everything I need it to. Except for run all the boosted agent frameworks. It chokes on open code, Claude Code, I don't dare try codex.

Codex CLI is written in Rust and significantly more efficient than Claude Code. I had no trouble running it on a 2012 laptop. VSCode/standard browsers were the main problem software, as one would expect.

And you can remote control it from the Codex Desktop app (now the new ChatGPT app) or from the ChatGPT mobile app.

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

#42

Post by tmp10423288442 »

trelane wrote: post #18
internet2000 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Amazing how many of Microsoft's competitors don't need the help, yet receive it. > Nobody bought more than one of them, the experience was that bad. https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/netbook-sales-exploded-i... "The market for small and cheap laptops -- netbooks -- boomed in 2008, with almost 15 million of the things sold globally." On the contrary, they were incred…

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.

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

#43

Post by globular-toast »

I have a 17 year old Dell Mini 9 that's never seen Windows in its life. Was one of the first laptops I could find that didn't have the Windows tax. I put Gentoo on it several years ago, which took a few days, I wonder if the binaries come in 32 bit nowadays.

While most things ran absolutely fine, Firefox ran like crap, which really makes you realise how awful the modern web is.

When I got the netbook I had dreams of hacking in Emacs wherever I went. The tiny keyboard makes that quite uncomfortable, though. So it was only really used as a music player and web browser while traveling a few times, basically what you'd use a phone for today.

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

#44

Post by miladyincontrol »

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…

Some those budget atom devices were also rather annoying for having only a 32 bit uefi despite a 64 bit cpu >4GB of ram. Could still boot into a 64 bit OS, just was a bit of a confusing hiccup you'll still see people running into from time to time.

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

#45

Post by happymellon »

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.

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

#46

Post by b800h »

I loved my Eee PC - I'd use it to program on the bus, train, or on a plane, but for me they were killed off by a combination of smartphones, and getting a driving license. Some years back I bought a new battery for mine, and reinstalled Linux, but I just couldn't find a use for it.

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

#47

Post by MayeulC »

I still use my Samsung n130, though I went with Alpine after Arch dropped support for 32 bit (there were a few pain points with Arch 32 in the early days, I tried guix but it was too slow and guix uses a lot of RAM during updates).

It works decently, is sufficient for ssh-ing into other hosts. Though web browsing is a pain. I used to mostly use Dillo and elinks, MPV+yt-dlp for videos.

Unfortunately I left it sit for a bit too long and the battery is dead now. I'm thinking of fixing it and upgrading the power port to USB-C. Sometimes I also think about building a compute module-based motherboard for it.

There were interesting bits in the setup (blacklisting defective RAM addresses for instance), maybe I should make a short writeup :)

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

#48

Post by ocd »

I guess there aren't that many options anymore for x86, but for really old amd64 I've been using Void Linux recently. It's not too bad even for non-technical users if they're provided an alias/function file to source in shell (with obvious naming conventions like "upgrade" or something.)

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

#49

Post by microtonal »

globular-toast wrote: post #43

I have a 17 year old Dell Mini 9 that's never seen Windows in its life. Was one of the first laptops I could find that didn't have the Windows tax. I put Gentoo on it several years ago, which took a few days, I wonder if the binaries come in 32 bit nowadays. While most things ran absolutely fine, Firefox ran like crap, which really makes you realise how awful the modern web is. When I got the netbook I had dreams of…

Was one of the first laptops I could find that didn't have the Windows tax.

In the early/mid 2000s, we used to buy computers, install Linux and then ask Dell etc. to refund the Windows license, which often worked.

My girlfriend at the time got a Dell desktop really cheap that way. IIRC it cost something like 400 or 500 Euro and Dell refunded ~100 Euro for not using the Windows license. I never really understood the economics, because installing Windows was probably profitable for them due to the adware shipped with Windows.

Probably it was easier/better for them to just give a refund to noisy Linux users than to admit that they were making big bucks on all the crap shipped with the Windows installation.

As an aside, at the time a lot of HP laptops could be purchased with FreeDOS and I think Lenovo was similar.

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

#50

Post by alterom »

teekert wrote: 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?

I had the 1000HE too, and ran everything from LaTeX to DAWs on it.

The only serious contender in that category now IMO is Chuwi Minibook X.

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