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 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 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.
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 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.
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!
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...
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.
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!
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.
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...)