I have this 11 year old oddly resistant Pentium laptop and I’m thinking of turning it into a reading/light-programming tool. It used to run great back in the day but modern software has gotten so bloated that it can barely run GNOME with Firefox, so I was thinking of sticking to command line only. Is there anything specific I should look into?
In specific I mainly only want to be able to download and read mdbooks in the terminal, probably using archlinux32 as the OS (or maybe LFS?). Captcha abuse and all that javascript already ruined browsing with Lynx so I have little hopes of actually browsing the web. I also intend to get a new battery as it only lasts 1-2 hours nowadays. Any other 32bit/tty-only customisation guides are also welcome.
For the really old stuff, I used to do NetBSD. I’m sure their 32bit x86 support is still top notch.
Gnome is quite heavy, before you succumb to the void of choosing the best prompt format, try some other, lighter WMs. I like Fluxbox very much; XFCE is lighter than Gnome/KDE but still similar; i3 is also lightweight.
I guess there might be some light Firefox forks, or maybe even go back to iceweasel?As for command line, check out:
- tmux
- zsh (it’s completion mechanisms are imo better than bash)
- mc
- how to define your shortcuts as functions inside every login shell, instead of using aliases which are easier but have limitations
Btw, slackware still maintains x32
And there’s also arch32Suckless on OpenBSD.
You might also try one of the alternate operating systems like Haiku or ReactOS. Haiku is very lightweight and supports both Qt and some Wine-based apps. Maybe K-Meleon on Haiku works for your system.
You could run Void on it… and a few other niche distros, but Void is the most mainstream one that still supports x86. Plus, xbps-src holds almost everything else that is not present in the official repos, so, you could just compile from source using the template.
Forget about the battery, it’s not worth it. Use it till it dies completely, then remove it and use it on the charger.
I’ll be away from both stable electricity and stable internet so I can’t just ditch a battery.
Are you a horse?
Didn’t realise I walked into comedy central.
Doesn’t really matter, those chargers can take in from about 90V to about 250, 260V. Forget what the sticker says about 110~230, they’re designed for unstable voltage operation (not actually designed for that, but they don’t wanna make different ones for EU and UK/US voltages coz it costs more, plus people bitch about not being able to use them abroad, so they just make the same ones and ship with different plugs). Trust me, they can handle voltage swings pretty darn good. They’re SMPS power supplies, they’re designed to output the same voltage in a very wide range of input voltages.
If you really think that a battery will help (it might help… in some cases… depending on how it’s built), just leave the battery on even if it’s dead. It might work as voltage dumper in some cases, but as I said, it depends on the design.
By “stable” I mean that for the majority of the time I will not have any electricity or internet. My use case explicitly requires battery and offline software.
Void seems cool.
But battery might be important since a lot of laptops will not start if the batttery is missing or has undervoltage. General advise would therefore be to not discharge the battery to a bare mininum but to keep it always at least 20-30% charged. Especially when Laptop is not used for longer time.
Older models start, no prob there. Newer ones, that don’t have detachable batteries, yes, they can be a problem (sometimes, depends on make and model… usually brands like Dell or Lenovo can make a fuss over it). Even in those cases, there are BIOS mods that remove this limitation.
Of course, that general advice is good and should be followed. But some batteries will die even if you follow these advices. There were some laptops back in the day that had a recharge cycle counter inside the charge/discharge controller in the battery. They would just die, out of the blue, after, let’s say, 1000 charges. People that were used to having their laptops plugged in all the time, regardless if they needed that or not, spent the recharge cycles a lot faster than people that just plugged in the laptop whenever it was low on battery. This happened because the charging circuit sometimes falsely reports the battery as a little drained (99%), so it will recharge it just a tad. Still, this “just a tad” added 1 recharge cycle to the count. Over the course of a day, this may happen, 10, 15 times, which ammounts to 10, 15 charges accourding to the counter. So, their batteries basically went dead right after their warranty expired. There are ways to reset the counter or completely jump that piece of code, but it’s just not worth it. Too much RCE work for very little gain.
It’s a shame though… those batteries were still OK. It was just a shitty move from the manufacturers to try and squeze more money from their clients for batteries.
I always like running Lubuntu on stuff like this. I have a netbook running an older Atom CPU and 2GB of DDr2. It runs very well on Lubuntu.
Okay I have some experience reviving some old 32bit computers so here is my opinion.
Tiny core is crazy fast for old hardware. Installing that thing is like ducktaping a jet engine to a bicycle, is amazing. However it brings all the problems you can expect with ducktaping a jet engine to a bicycle. To use it without going mad you need to comfortable with linux.
On second place is Debian with lxqt. It’s light, usable, the easiest to install and use. It will not blow your socks off but it will be usable. I recommend lxqt because it has better suport than lxde. For the installation I never used the graphical install only the ncurses one and in the software selection I only choose “lxqt” and “base system something”.
If you want Debian but faster to boot use Devuan with OpenRC.
Another option is Alpine, that shit is light and flexible but again you need to be comfortable with Linux. I don’t use it because wifi didn’t work.
Void is really nice, it’s an amazing project. But again I had wifi problems.
I never tried Slackware 32 but it seems like a good option. However I think it may give more headaches than other options on this list
I used arch32 and I recommend against it. The project is barely maintained I had a lot of package problems and it was really unstable.
I do not recommend using Gentoo (or LFS for that matter) for speed. The performance improvements you get from building everything from source are negligible. It’s a great project to learn linux and control freaks as myself but not for performance.
Tips: Read the Arch wiki “improving performance” page. Web browser (gui) - falkon Web browser (cli) - links (I found it more “user friendly” than lynx) Video player - mvp Terminal - xterm And I forgot the rest, sorry xD
Removed by mod
I put PrimeOS on one - it’s an Android x86 fork. Runs pretty well
Linux Mint Debian Edition 32-bit. but like there’s no way you’re gonna do anything useful with it. source: I have a C2D, so at least double as fast, max 4 GB RAM (doesn’t use all of it), X1600 graphics. that thing is unusable for anything.
granted, if you wanna enter your thoughts in some rudimentary text editor and just go CLI only, maybe you can have a whole week before you realize it isn’t worth it. huge power draw, terrible performance, a battery that lasts half a second and a screen that you can sorta-maybe-sometimes read.
quad core laptops with IPS screens that can run up to 16 GB are like $50 nowadays. throw it out.
quad core laptops with IPS screens that can run up to 16 GB are like $50 nowadays. throw it out.
Feel free to send me the $50 bucks and I’ll buy one. I still won’t throw out perfectly functional hardware. Until then I’ll make use of what I have, thank you very much.
I have an old thinkpad that I’ve turned into a HomeBridge/ Print server / media server / wireless backup base.
It has Ubuntu on it, an external drive shared via SMB for movies, CUPS for print serving, HoneBridge to manage all of my home automation, and another external SMB share to run automated backup from my regular laptops.
You can turn it into a PiHole, or an Octoprint server, or a local DNS routing server, or use it to connect to Arduino devices, or just throw Arch on it with only the basics and have a fully functional laptop.
Put a distro like Arch 32 bit and use it like a small, low-power consumption web server.
