Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux(parksb.github.io) |
Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux(parksb.github.io) |
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 Enter or Escape did something reasonable.
A few years ago I installed Debian, qBittorrent and Samba. I figured it could handle something IO-bound. I ran it for a couple of years and then recycled it when my Internet got faster than the 100 Mbps ethernet card.
A tip if you have one of those laying around and it always ran a 32-bit OS is to check if the CPU is really 32-bit only. Only the very first Atom generation was 32-bit, but the next generations had poor 64-bit driver support on Windows, so OEMs shipped it as a 32-bit machine. Not the case for OP’s netbook, theirs is really 32-bit only.
It was by far my favorite laptop I’ve ever had. I put an SSD in it, though, which made a pretty huge difference.
Do you mean that the titlebar would be off screen so you couldn't move/close the window?
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 it. That's honestly the Linux thing I miss most when using any other OS.
Recently retired my pc with fx6300 because it take too much desktop space; and just setup a mini pc with j6412, also installed arch Linux, i3wm for desktop stuffs
Also find a old usb Bluetooth receiver make it play some music
It works great and use this new setup to get a Agent free experience
I am running agents on my ten year old ThinkPad T460. I gave them their own user account, to limit blast radius, but I haven't had any issues with them nuking things yet. (Except for my code quality...)
Well, maybe my API keys with $5 credit have been exfiltrated though. The world may never know :)
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 this side project. Thank you!
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 on Linux, I even used it to live record 1,5-hour long radio shows via an old Mbox2 audio interface and some CLI recording software. Created a huge ramdisk just in case, but everything went well. Netbooks are weird and interesting machines.
As for which editor that is, it depends a little bit on your needs, but there are ones specifically geared towards being distraction free like https://ghostwriter.kde.org/
Although markdown may not be what you're after. I personally consider formatting another form of distraction, ao this would be a plus for me. But if you write math-heavy papers, going with something else like Typst or LATeX may be a better choice.
Sounds like it started on XP running poorly, and ended on Arch... running poorly.
As far as cheap, low-spec, disposable laptops go, Chromebooks are the spiritual successor to netbooks.
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 incredibly popular.
Most people fall for marketing, do no deep research or consideration of their needs, and have a piss-poor time.
But some did the reading: Ubuntu on the Dell Mini 9, for example, was a dreamboat!, with or without touchscreen mod.
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.
The challenges came from tracking down working Wi-Fi drivers for the proprietary hardware and updating the BIOS, since the stock version has a bug where it emits lid close events that Windows XP ignores but Linux dutifully handles.
Apparently, I do still have a few photos in backups of someone's own enchanted marvel of a portal to universes powered by a Celeron D, USB pen-drive of 16 GiB, a single RAM of 1 GiB, we all managed to acquire and built, for such a short time we had!
Preview of the device: https://imgur.com/gallery/h1tWKp3
Since the CPU had no physical address extension (PAE) to electrify a more common OS, and something customary was required for the limited resources, where we chose ArchLinux 32-bit (now ArchLinux32, indeed) and arranged a custom AwesomeWM environment visually suggesting a console design just for it!
And dear... we adventured a few nights back then backed by this machine and some self-compiled emulation software, ZSnes and Gens, for the titles she had collected from a few local stores and magazines!
It was quite long ago... more than a decade and half... but it like all happened just yesterday, and how freaking awesome it was!
You likely had a similar event/memory! Please do remember these...
Related: https://www.archlinux32.org/architecture/ (The below table lists the compatibility of CPUs (identified by their available flags) with architectures...)