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.
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.
On Debian at least, Alt+grab, or the window menu "move" could save your day.
It was by far my favorite laptop I’ve ever had. I put an SSD in it, though, which made a pretty huge difference.
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”.
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.
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).
For the web I use DIllo and a custom build of Otter Browser against the older QT5 Webkit engine.
For web media I use streamlink and yt-dlp.
It ran Octoprint for me :)
Sounds like it started on XP running poorly, and ended on Arch... running poorly.
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 :)
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 :)
Instead of Mint I'd pick something like Alpine Linux with LXQT:
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/LXQt
Also, adding ZRAM will fly on that machine.
Also, you can build SCUMMVM (install alpine-sdk, get the alpine ports and edit the pkg build file so scummvm gets compiled with these options at the configure build stage:
#!/bin/sh
sh configure \
--enable-static \
--enable-all-engines \
--enable-all-unstable-engines \
--enable-release \
--enable-plugins \
--disable-hq-scalers \
--disable-dlc \
--disable-scummvmdlc \
--disable-discord
The only serious contender in that category now IMO is Chuwi Minibook X.
They pioneered the netbook with the EeePC line.
Sadly, they didn't keep it alive.
There was also a EeePC specific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EasyPeasy which was even better.
Since then I have installed various things for amusement, including a cut down Chromebook OS and the OLPC Linux. The limit was always the tiny root partition (4GB SSD). I had some limited success joining with the second SSD (16GB) using btrfs.
I think the albeit tiny SSD was this machine's saving grace compared to HDD models, in terms of speed.
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.
I want to run it offline, but still be able to sync my writing on-demand when I'm done.
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.
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.
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.
#!/bin/sh
modprobe zram
if [ -e /dev/zram0 ]
then
echo "zram0 on"
exit 1
fi
zramctl --find --size 512M
mkswap /dev/zram0
swapon -p 99 /dev/zram0
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.
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.
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...)
PCSX-PGXP runs really well too, forget PGXP on that machine but at low resolution games will run fine with a simple bilinear filter. Parasiteve Eve can be damn addictive ;)
Also, text adventure games; a good one with a great history such Tristam Island it's fine too.
Also, compile Scummvm with these options from git (pacman -S scummvm, check the dependencies; run pacman -R scummvm later), then compile it with these options:
#!/bin/sh
export CC="clang"
export CXX="clang++"
export CXXFLAGS="-fpermissive -fcommon"
export LDFLAGS="-Wl,-z,muldefs"
export LANG=C
make clean -j4
env CC="clang" CXX="clang++" sh configure \
--enable-static \
--enable-all-engines \
--enable-all-unstable-engines \
--enable-release \
--enable-plugins \
--disable-hq-scalers \
--disable-dlc \
--disable-scummvmdlc \
--disable-discord
make CC="ccache clang" CXX="ccache clang++" LDFLAGS+="-Wl,-z,muldefs"