Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
parksb.github.io123 points by parksb 4 days ago
123 points by parksb 4 days ago
Reviving? I'm still running a 2007 EeePC 1001HA on Fedora.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I had a Toshiba NB305, which apparently had an Atom N450 (just looking at some old reviews, I don’t have it running anymore). It seemed fine for basic command line stuff and some web browsing (websites already had too much JavaScript at the time but at least you could usually get away with turning it off without losing any essential functionality).
It was by far my favorite laptop I’ve ever had. I put an SSD in it, though, which made a pretty huge difference.
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”.
> 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?
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.
> 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).
I just set the Raleigh-Reloaded GTK theme (QT5 too with qt5ct) and a small 8px font.
I use bettertouchtool on macos to replicate exactly that behavior (and many more).
Windows also has shortcuts to retrieve off-screen windows, but it's more difficult to remember so I have to google it every time this situation comes up.
I use the system menu (Alt+Space) all the time, mostly because I find that closing a window via Alt+Space, C is more convenient (keys close to each other for the left hand) than Alt+F4. And then knowing that M is for move and S for size is natural.
> They were already painfully slow when they were new
Mostly, yes. I had an acer aspire one d250 (similar specs to that in the article) and i worked mostly okay under linux for light development work, meaning i was in high school doing java development with emacs and running apache ant by hand.
Other than that yeah they were painfully slow.
Also i bought a similar machine at a flea market for like 20€ and was sorely disappointed to find out it had a Broadcom wifi chip which is a pain to work with and i’m not really interested in buying an atheros card for another 20€.
HP mini there, with ZRAM it's really fast. I use Flubox+UXTerm+a bunch of CLI/TUI tools among mpv, nsxiv and mupdf. The OS I use it's hyperbola GNU/Linux, A bit outdated but most modern stuff it's compiled from source. For gaming I have mednafen, frotz, pcsxr, Flare RPG (git), GearHead 1 and 2 and a few more. Oh, and Scummvm with games from Blade Runner to Ultima I-IV, Technobabylon, Virtuaverse, The Longest Journey, Sierra and Lucas Arts games and about... ¿2000 games more?
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.
This brings back memories. I loved my Asus Eee PC 1215p. Bought it with my own money. It was the computer I had when I was moving out of my parental home when I was 20 y/o. When I moved out I had Ubuntu installed on it, but in my student room I realised I had issues with connecting to the internet somehow. Went back to my moms and installed back Windows 7, with the Windows 98 look-and-feel-setting which was a built in option, great user experience. The last Windows machine I even used, but it was amazing. I brought it with me on my hitch hiking adventures through Europe, was using it to DJ using my personal iTunes library in a Polish hippie/hacker/eco village I was staying at. Eventually I stupidly broke the keyboard my cleaning it with a wet towel when it was on, I still feel bad about that really. What a machine, I absolutely loved it!
Would you mind sharing few words about the village you mentioned? I am from Poland and am really curious what that village was :)
I too had it and remember it fondly, it got me through my studies. Very portable machine. I eventually swapped it for a thinkpad which I loved even more. Now I’m with a MacBook Air for the time being, but I think I’ll get another thinkpad when the time comes
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?)
"I did not expect much, and because the bottlenecks were the HDD and CPU I did not feel any noticeable performance improvement."
Sounds like it started on XP running poorly, and ended on Arch... running poorly.
The other day, I tried the latest Kubuntu on a Samsung netbook from 2011. It was impossibly slow, and Wayland did not even render colours correctly on the screen.
I bought a subsidised Windows EeePC 901 and stuck Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. Much more useable. Windows was laughably bad. It limited the number of open applications!
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.
Linux can really unlock old hardware well, and glad it work great on 32bit systems
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
What's the last part referring to? Isn't all Linux agent free by definition? Or do you mean, compared to windows?
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 :)
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
Haha, same vibe! Mine was running mandrake/mandriva + kde. Also programming on such a low specced device gave a superpower (and good coding hygiene): you would immediately spot memleaks and inefficient code because you would feel it as entire seconds of slowness and unresponsiveness. Like, none of my GUI apps had work happening on the event thread, but I could immediately tell which ones would.
Had a few Eee machines back in the day, loved them a lot. Crazy to see them in the current time being revived.
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 :)
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.
I had Edubuntu with XFCE and Chicago95 theme on one of those until I gave it away last year.
It ran Octoprint for me :)
I really miss netbooks. They were an amazing moment for Linux. No surprise Microsoft killed them.
> I really miss netbooks. They were an amazing moment for Linux. No surprise Microsoft killed them.
As far as cheap, low-spec, disposable laptops go, Chromebooks are the spiritual successor to netbooks.
I'd add the move from feature phones to smart phones and later tablets. Early adopters were getting them 2007/08, 5 years on from that the platform was well on its way to maturing and with a broader range of hardware and the software ecosystem was moving to target it too. Then there's the question of what form best suits the usage the tasks the netbook audience have, if you're doing the very basic browsing/comms tasks, why take a comparatively big slab when a 4-5" will do, and if you do need a portable PC why constrain yourself to a weak system, netbooks were in no-mans-land.
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 incredibly popular.
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.
> compromises were such that you really wouldn’t want to buy another netbook if you could.
This is directly contradicted by the existence of Netbook fans.
It’s much like today’s mobile experience.
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.
https://frame.work/fi/en/laptop12 is kinda close
The netbooks were for most a lot cheaper. I think a modern equivalent is a shitty Chromebook.
yikes that in a minimal configuration costs ~700 euros or whatever the currency is by default.
You could get a much more powerful system for a lot less.
i didn't even realized they are dead, was looking for a cheap one for running my calendar server and couldn't find a single one. I had one it was really handy
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 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 this side project. Thank you!
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 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.
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.
Yeah, wifi on DOS is doable, but very limited in speed and not exactly straightforward to set up (so much that I haven't seriously considered trying myself). Here's an overview and a writeup:
I would say, you install a lightweight Linux, boot directly into your favorite distraction free editor at full screen and sync the files back to phone and big computer via something like syncthing/Nextcloud/etc.
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.
Thanks! Ghostwriter is a really good candidate. I mostly use iA Writer on my mac and they seem to share the same philosophy.
I tried this a while back. The main problem was that their keyboards are usually terrible.
I did the same thing with my netbook 4 years ago, but I went with Debian instead to make my life a bit easier. It was, at the time, one of a small number of distros that still officially supported x86 32-bit binaries.
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.
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.
You went the wrong direction. Go older, not newer.
After trying dozens of lightweight Linuxes with disappointing results, I downgraded my Sony Vaio P to WinXP. This has full GPU acceleration on Intel Pouslbo and for XP the machine's 2GB of RAM is spacious. Sad, but there we are.
For games Mednafen and PCSXR do wonders; and SCummvm itself supports tons of graphical and text adventures (even modern ones such as Technobabylon) and tons of source ports (and recompilations such as Super Mario 64) will run fine with just the bundled GL 2.1 adapter.
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
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 I guess I wouldn’t start using Linux/macos and learned how to code. So lucky device, I guess?
Asus, not Acer :)
They pioneered the netbook with the EeePC line.
Sadly, they didn't keep it alive.
I kept my old laptop (bought in 2007) alive for quite a while too. But last year I finally retired it. I also used archlinux 32 which worked fine for a while. But at some point the breakages really got too bad. I was using xfce4. For a while the xfce4-terminal was broken and would not start. That has the easy workaround of using xterm instead. But there were more breakages and it just started taking too much time. Quite a bit of software is ditching, or has ditched, 32-bit support.
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.)
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.
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.
I use a 2010 Macbook Air with Linux XFCE desktop and it works well for browsing and simple office work.
> Still, it occurred to me that it might be fun to take the netbook completely apart and start replacing its hardware piece by piece.
Is it just me or did it end on a cliffhanger? That's the last line!
Add zram:
#!/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
Do not run Ubuntu on these old machines, use plain Debian instead (no fat desktop needed, no overhead due to braindead snap packaging etc.). Xfce4 should be fine. SSDs help and also using zswap to counter the low RAM. The last official install media for 32bit (first Intel Atoms) is bookworm but updating is no problem.
I think Slackware would have been a good fit, and much easier to install :)
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.
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.
The Community behind the marvelous project as ArchLinux32, are ineffably awesome... The project provide various options, including i496, i696, and pentium4 architectures with or without PAE requirements. The OS comes with pre-configured systemd, and supports numerous up-to-date repositories out-of-the-box. Some relatively lightweight custom window manager like Awesome or i3wm may also shape the environment if X required.
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...)
> Preview of the device: https://imgur.com/gallery/h1tWKp3
The mobo on the pictures is a Socket AM2/2+ one, for AMD processors.
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-m2n-mx-se-plus-r...
For SNES I'd use Mednafen with the snes_faust core; and for difficult games to emulate I'd use the snes core. Also Mednafen works for MD/NES/GB/GBA/NGP and tons more systems.
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"[dead]
[dead]
ya all should i get arch?