Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

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.

The Asus 1000H served me well for my whole bachelor, and also became my first hackintosh with the glorious 10.6.8, iDeneb flavor (i even bought a new wifi card natively supported by Mac OS X for that).

I still have it, it still holds a charge. Amazing little machine, portability and usage time were really top notch (not so the performance, but I was patient, and even used it for Sketchup and Illustrator)

I like how efficient Arch is, in the sense that you have nothing and now you get to pick and choose what you want.

My main desktop I use for full time software development and video editing is from 2014. I've run Windows on it forever. I put Arch on it ~8 months ago.

A full desktop environment I put together based on niri boots at 1.1 GB of memory. Every app I want is installed (tons of CLI tools, various GUI tools, Docker, video editors, browser, etc.) all together comes in at 10 GB of disk total for everything based on what `df -h` says for my root partition.

My machine does have 16 GB of memory so I'm not pressed for memory, but it's nice to know the machine runs on a system designed to not be bloated.

After switching from Windows 10 Pro, it felt like I got a hardware upgrade. Things open faster and generally speaking everything just feels snappier.

As an aside, it was super fun spending a few days setting everything up in a repeatable way which I've now replicated on a number of systems with https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice.

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!

I loved my Netbook. Acer Aspire One.

The early ~2008 Linux-supplied dirt cheap Acer Aspire One A110L netbooks came with small (8GB?) and horrifically slow SSDs.

Back in the days of such things, we'd upgrade the RAM and use Windows XP with the write filter to make them great little machines. There was an SD card slot in the side that would happily store files.

The SSDs were very limited in read-write cycles from what I remember. More noticeable they brutally slow at writing. By shoving all the writes into RAM instead of direct the SSD, everything ran more smoothly.

If you wanted to keep any changes (usually due to OS or software updates) then you ran a batch file that wrote out the changes to the SSD before shutdown. Otherwise you shut the machine down and all your changes were immediately forgotten.

RAM Upgrade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3WVb1dL--o Enhanced Write Filter: https://www.prime-expert.com/articles/a04/speeding-up-ssd-ba...

It was more than fast enough for the time, the form factor was perfect for my teenage hands (not that they're much bigger now) and it was cheap and small enough to drag everywhere with me. (I copied and pasted some of that from a previous comment of mine about it.)

I owned a Samsung NC10 which had a non-shitty keyboard as its outstanding feature. Was a nice little Linux machine I used a lot. Only bad thing, those Intel Atom N2xx CPUs are just awfully slow, even back then.

Today realistically I don't think it really makes that much sense to bother with those devices even for small home servers. You can e.g. get used thin clients for cheap which run circles around those old CPUs and support way more RAM while likely being as power efficient if not more. At the bare minimum I would avoid using any 32 bit x86 CPU for running anything modern, even Debian dropped official support for that architecture now.

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?)

If you really want to revive the machine, here are my tips and tricks

https://github.com/parksb/parksb.github.io-comments/issues/2...

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 had one of these and loved it, taking it everywhere. I vaguely remember it running some flavor of Linux that was pretty usable at the time. Sometime in 2012 the display started having issues and then it stopped powering on shortly thereafter. I would spend the next decade trying to recreate something resembling the experience through Chromebooks but never really getting there, eventually surrendering to the 13-inch MacBook Air.

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.

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?

> 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.

I don't understand the unwarranted and ongoing care and enthusiasm for this category of e-waste that was forcibly put upon us.

They came out in 2008, were sold until 2010, had literally less performance than a 2000 Pentium III CPU, were lauded from pundits left and right, and probably the school/hand-me-down laptops of that age (like today's e-waste class Chromebooks).

Especially when Acer and whatever had proper laptops with proper Intel SU-class CPUs and 3-4 GB RAM for the same price.

I disliked these "netbooks" back then and still do, and all that followed its footsteps, including the "laptop"-lookalikes with 32 GB e-MMC storage some mobile carriers would give out with their plans.

It's a disrespectful destitute class of computing.

I know that the Raspberry Pis came out later, but a Raspberry Pi 2 is a hundred times better engineered and well-rounded product, that will also run a desktop better than these netbooks (or at all).

On a related note, I also have colleagues at work who will run only sub-200 dollar smartphones and enjoy living the proper Nigeria/Bangladesh experience from 1-2 years ago. I also know that they don't use heating at home, and do everything in the name of efficiency.

> 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 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 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.

> 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 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 :)

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.

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.

Not directly related to the article, but I've got to give it up to Tesla for continuing to eek out every last ounce of performance from the Atoms they used for 2018-2021 Model 3 car computers. They still push updates to the UI for these cars nine years later, albeit with some stuff feature flagged out.

I had Edubuntu with XFCE and Chicago95 theme on one of those until I gave it away last year.

It ran Octoprint for me :)

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 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...)

ya all should i get arch?

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.

"These 2008-2010 era netbooks are impossible to use as a desktop."

I used one as a replacement for a "desktop computer" for 7+ years

Here, "desktop" means the form factor not the interface

I used NetBSD as the OS. I never tried to use Windows. It was during this time that I stopped using X11 entirely, i.e., no "desktop" metaphor, no terminal emulator programs, and began staying in VGA textmode 100% of the time

If I needed to view graphics I sent the files to another computer running graphical OS on the LAN but not connected to the internet. At the time, this was mainly an iPad

As a matter of practice I never connected Apple computers to the internet

These ASUS netbooks indeed had a slow processor but the amount I accomplished with this computer was substantial. I created bootable USB sticks that booted to rootfs in RAM and never touched disk, an immutable, custom OS that resembles ChromeOS today, but better (no Chrome or other software written and controlled by an adtrech corporation). I could pull out the stick after boot and use the USB port for something else.^1 NetBSD kernels compiled quickly enough and I did not use QEMU for testing

1. It was perplexing to me to read about the problems people had with SD cards when the RaspberryPi appeared. I pull the SD card out after boot, the OS runs entirely from RAM

I still have this netboook. There is some issue with the power. I have thought about trying to fix it

Another thing to keep in mind if you have an old netbook lying around is that a lot of the later models that came out after Windows 7 have PowerVR graphics (rebranded as "Intel GMA 3600") instead of the basic Intel chipset graphics. The only operating systems that will work with the GMA 3600 are 32-bit Windows 7 and whatever version of Fedora was current in 2012 (thanks to a closed source beta driver Intel released).

> 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.

A lot of netbooks will lock the CPU into 32-bit mode in the BIOS, so getting them to boot a 64-bit OS also requires patching the BIOS. It's doable but has limited benefits when they're limited to 2-4 GB of RAM anyway.

> 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.

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.

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.

After playing around with old spec hardware I would say before OP gives up try installing Alpine Linux.

Run Alpine Linux from RAM. That will consume about 125MB with the standard install. Set up persistence so you save changes. Install a lightweight window manager and use a lightweight browser like qutebrowser.

Even thought Alpine uses musl you can still get apps like Obsidian to run. I can't remember how though but this whole setup was usable on a PC that had a built in 56K modem.

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.

I had an HP Mini 5102 and I absolutely loved it! I actually revived it a few years ago and used it for some modern programming tasks. I think I tried to compile rustc on it once and had to leave it on for the night, coming back to it in the morning and finding that it had just frozen fully.

Unfortunately its CMOS battery ran out and when I went in to replace it I had to unplug a few ribbon cables which of course promptly snapped the now-brittle plastic connectors. Its been sitting on a shelf waiting to be revived once again ever since... I miss that little thing.

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”.

When you have a dialog window too big for the screen, you can Alt+Space to open the system menu, then activate the Move menu item, then you can use arrow keys to move the window around, even with the title bar out of bounds.

Not just for obsolete systems, sometimes a full screen application might pick a tiny desktop resolution as well, and not properly restore the resolution, so you could need to deal with a too-big dialog box in that situation as well.

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.

Mine (Acer Aspire One 756) had an EFI disguised as a BIOS. I only discovered it was EFI after a few years, when I inserted some bootable flash drive, opened the boot menu and saw an EFI entry for the flash drive there. Other than that, it’s as if they were trying to keep the EFI a secret (nothing in the settings hinted at it and I couldn’t get it to boot in EFI mode by default).

Those cheap 2006 Mac Pros also had 32 bit EFI

Forgot about this. That was annoying.

yes, some tablets (eg Dell Venue), real pita there..

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

If you really want to revive the machine, here are my tips and tricks

https://github.com/parksb/parksb.github.io-comments/issues/2...

I loved my Netbook. Acer Aspire One.

The early ~2008 Linux-supplied dirt cheap Acer Aspire One A110L netbooks came with small (8GB?) and horrifically slow SSDs.

RAM Upgrade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3WVb1dL--o Enhanced Write Filter: https://www.prime-expert.com/articles/a04/speeding-up-ssd-ba...

I had Edubuntu with XFCE and Chicago95 theme on one of those until I gave it away last year.

It ran Octoprint for me :)

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 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.

I think the albeit tiny SSD was this machine's saving grace compared to HDD models, in terms of speed.

> 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.

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.

Arch is also great for Intel macbooks around that age.

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.

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