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.

I still run, and am writing this from, a 16-or-17 year old Dell E6510 (i5-540) that serves as my "around the house" computer. The battery life (with a huge 9 cell that protrudes out the back) isn't great, and it's hot and heavy, but with 8GiB of RAM and an SSD it works pretty well on Trixie with Cinnamon.

My main machine is a 13 year old Lenovo y510p running Debian and KDE. You'd be hard-pressed to tell that it's anywhere near that age.

The only aspect that has been annoying with both is graphics. Both machines are nvidia and are long past their support periods. The y510p has SLI (one graphics card is in the CD drive slot) which never worked on Linux. When removing the second card, the on-processor Intel graphics can be used, which have better support than nvidia, so I stick with that. I don't do anything graphics intensive anyway.

The biggest upgrade with old computers, without any doubt, is an SSD. I still remember getting my first one back in about 2011, a used 60GiB OCZ Vertex, and it was truly magic seeing the computer boot to the desktop in a few seconds even on a core 2 duo.

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!

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?)

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.

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

One use of these old laptop/netbooks is to have an always on server that can even survive a power outage of a couple hours (due to the onboard battery).

As others have mentioned, the RAM is really low for a desktop but perfectly fine for running a FTP/File/PiHole etc and are usually more powerful than a RaspberryPi.

They also have multiple USB A ports if you want to add storage, ethernet etc.

I really miss netbooks. They were an amazing moment for Linux. No surprise Microsoft killed them.

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 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!

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.

Had a few Eee machines back in the day, loved them a lot. Crazy to see them in the current time being revived.

> I did not expect much, and because the bottlenecks were the HDD and CPU I did not feel any noticeable performance improvement. Still, it occurred to me that it might be fun to take the netbook completely apart and start replacing its hardware piece by piece.

I would look at swapping out the HDD for something solid state - lighter, less power, higher performance for random R/W.

Then it's just a case of lightening the load of the CPU as much as possible, strip out everything that is not needed.

I've run modern Firefox on much lighter devices. One of my netbooks is the same spec as this, and I do browsing + coding on it easily.

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?

> On this netbook, which has 1GB of RAM, if you keep the swap partition small you will run into “No space left on device” errors all the time.

The author doesn't explain why but I'm guessing this is because `/tmp` is filling up. Setting a quota on this mount point would help limit the impact that badly behaving programs might have on RAM usage.

> I could not remember whether the machine had gotten even slower, or whether it had always been like this and I had once thought even this was fast.

In addition to the usual suspects (aging hardware, planned obsolescence, bad memories), I wonder how much CPU is burned by software trying to talk to long dead backends and the retry loops and errors that occur as a result.

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 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 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.

You should run something like Void, Alpine or antiX on these. HaikuOS also runs really well on them if you don't need actual Linux.

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 :)

Reviving? I'm still running a 2007 EeePC 1001HA on Fedora.

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.

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 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.

This machine is a good candidate for Damn Small Linux. I've put DSL on much older machines with a full snappy GUI experience.

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 use a 2010 Macbook Air with Linux XFCE desktop and it works well for browsing and simple office work.

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.

OpenBSD can do wonders on a machine like this.

Arch is also great for Intel macbooks around that age.

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.

> 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!

The problem with installing Arch on netbooks is that Arch needs internet to install. Some of netbooks have horrendous wifi. I have a Cherry Trail tablet. It has a quite good looking 1280x800 screen. it would be great as typewriter/background video machine, but the wifi and the sd card constantly disappear and reappear.

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

Run the script as root.

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.

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...)

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ya all should i get arch?