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 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.
> 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.
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.
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 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
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.
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?
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.
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 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!
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 :)
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It was by far my favorite laptop I’ve ever had. I put an SSD in it, though, which made a pretty huge difference.
Do you mean that the titlebar would be off screen so you couldn't move/close the window?
https://xkcd.com/1479/
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :)
Sounds like it started on XP running poorly, and ended on Arch... running poorly.
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!
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.
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.
As far as cheap, low-spec, disposable laptops go, Chromebooks are the spiritual successor to netbooks.
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...)