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

51–60 of 178 posts

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

#51

Post by alterom »

neuropacabra wrote: post #38

It was Acer EEE 1000HA (very similar to the one from this article) which made me to use Linux. Eventually even a new one under XP was terribly slow. To that moment I was quite enjoying Windows but this device opened a door into computers for me. I never used Windows again and learned a ton by building GMA950 drivers as they were not shipped with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron (omg). On one had terrible device on other hand…

Asus, not Acer :)

They pioneered the netbook with the EeePC line.

Sadly, they didn't keep it alive.

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

#52

Post by jordand »

I tried reviving my Asus Eee PC 1015PEM (1.5GHz dual core, 2GB RAM) and even running Linux Mint was a bit much for it (basic tasks were slow, and Wine had too much overhead for games). I initially tried upgrading the Windows 7 Starter to Windows 10, and while the upgrade did work...it was failing to even log in! Whole thing just seemed stalled.

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

#53

Post by hnlmorg »

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 original ones that shipped Linux were fine. It was only when Microsoft started giving away XP to Netbook OEMs to kill the desktop Linux threat that things really went bad.

People talk about modern Microsoft and how much they do for open source have such short memories. Microsoft used to do everything they can to kill open source and even referred to the ecosystem as “communism”.

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

#54

Post by embedding-shape »

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

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

#55

Post by DiggyJohnson »

russfink wrote: post #2

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

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

#56

Post by aruggirello »

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…

> It had a weird 1024x600 display panel, and a lot of applications expect you to have at least 1024x768

On Debian at least, Alt+grab, or the window menu "move" could save your day.

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

#58

Post by plqbfbv »

andai wrote: post #24
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…

> Sometimes apps would work fine until they opened a modal that was just a bit too tall, and you had to pray that Enter or Escape did something reasonable. Do you mean that the titlebar would be off screen so you couldn't move/close the window? https://xkcd.com/1479/ On the Xfce desktop at least there's a nice shortcut, alt+drag with left mouse button to move any window, and alt+drag with right mouse button to resize…

> Do you mean that the titlebar would be off screen so you couldn't move/close the window?

Not just the title bar, but often also e.g. half of the settings and the Cancel/Save/Ok buttons.

Basically the screen was 600 pixels in height, but the modal was designed after 2005 so it was 768 pixels tall, and you would get a cropped modal missing maybe 10% top and 10% bottom pixels that you couldn't interact with via mouse, and you couldn't resize nor move (either because it was fixed size, or because all corners that would allow you to do so were off-screen).

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

#60

Post by achairapart »

marttt wrote: post #27
achairapart wrote: post #11

I have one of these in a closet and wondered for years about how to turn it in a distraction free word processor/simple digital typewriter. Always loved the netbook form factor, and they were cheap! Funny thing is that probably I also have some 2GB DDR2 stick somewhere. Last thing I need to check for is the battery, I presume it is completely down after all those years. Anyway, this article will be very handy for thi…

Re: distraction free writing machine -- another option would be a FreeDOS/SvarDOS-based system: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/04/26/build-your-o... No kidding. Lots of fun to see a system actually boot in about 1 second. That aside, I've installed all kinds of systems on my trusty 2009 Dell Mini 9, a fanless netbook. For years, this was a CLI-only Tiny Core Linux system, currently running SvarDOS. While o…

Thanks! This is really really tempting, but I guess this leaves Wi-Fi on the table, right?

I want to run it offline, but still be able to sync my writing on-demand when I'm done.

Post reply on HN