This laptop was originally sold with Windows 7 32-bit edition installed. Even back then it was really unresponsive and clunky. After several years of it lying around and being useless, I decided to do a really lightweight debian install on it.
And guess what? It can do so much more than sit idly in some landfill.
Now I can use it to write my study notes in neovim (gives me a good excuse to learn vim, and I’m learning slowly), listen to music with gst123, learn c and c++, torrent large files with transmission-cli and qbittorrent, and the list goes on…
I mostly just use tty. I hit “startx i3” if I absolutely need a GUI, but for everything else, tty. I use links2 for Wikipedia, online resources and browsing memes which is already a big chunk of my internet usage. I was really giddy when I saw Tor browser had a 32-bit version, it runs surprisingly well even with less than 1 gigabyte of memory (unless I visit some really bloated sites)
I can’t play videos though, that’s the one major thing it can’t do. The integrated GPU is unsupported so playing videos or 3d-gaming is out of the question.
BTW is there a lemmy instance/frontend I can use via CLI or links2?
Whats the tool/command name in the 1st picture that shows you the resources usage?
That’s just htop, a pretty well-known cli system monitor
Also, if you like htop, youre going to love btop.
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Looks like htop.
Htop or top
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Debian is good for this. Enjoy it while there is still 32-bit support though. Edit- do you have any swap configured?
1 extra gig of swap was configured by Debian automatically on install. Should I add more?
Id make it 2 or 3 gb. That being said, 1 gb is fine for such a light install. I have a similarly specced pentium M machine running modern debian with OpenBox. For heavier tasks, it was hitting swap (using a web browser). Upping it to 2 gb ram fixed that.
Edit: this also came with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 gpu which probably has a bit more support than the PowerVR gpu in the Atom.
I think that seems like a good idea
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Ew, R*ddit
Forgive me father, for I have sinned 🛐
To be fair, I have also ventured to reddit several times last few days, mainly for my episode discussion of old tv shows.
It’s even funnier because the title uses the word “useful” and then shows a screenshot including reddit – lol
Gee, I’m sorry alright? Just wanted to show off Tor browser, old.reddit.com was the first thing that came to mind that I’d use with Tor 😅
No worries, really, just made me smirk on seeing lol
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I also have an old shitty computer from Acer with 4gb of RAM lying around.
I feel a bit guilty about not using it, but I’m already sharing my time between my Surface Go 1 (daily driver) and my girlfriend’s 2012 MacBook Pro, so I wouldn’t know what to do with it.
If anyone has an idea, I’m listening 👂
Backup server?
Remote backup server would be my suggestion.
Configure it with a VPN to talk to your home network and set it up at a trusted friend’s or family’s place.
I do this with a raspberry pi and an external HDD that takes daily/weekly/monthly snapshots, with daily rsync. Works nicely for me.
If it can play video at a reasonable quality, hook it up to a TV, fill it with torrented movies you want to watch and you’ll have your own home entertainment system.
That’s one idea. If it can’t play high quality videos there are still a lot more uses for it.
I’m curious why
links2over, say,w3m? It feels like none of the terminal browsers are as nice as they could be these days…I had both installed and was using them side-by-side. links2 was easier to learn and configure so I chose it over w3m, then uninstalled w3m.
Also edit: terminal browsers(at least links2) are surprisingly good if you just want read Wikipedia, browse memes, use search engines, and other static stuff once you get the hang of it.
Are you still using the original HDD it came with, or did you change it? I have an old All-in-one, 2012 Celeron with 2GB RAM which was supposed to be my nephew’s first computer, I installed Xubuntu 18 on it, everything works fine, even some online video watching, but dear lord the R/W speeds are atrociously low, which makes starting up any program a small test of patience.
It’s the original, slow HDD. And yeah, loading GUI programs is a pain but I don’t notice any unresponsiveness in tty, which is how I use it for 90% of its uptime.
I really gotta install something with dwm on my dad’s old nettop. It’s just sitting in a box for years. Gotta figure out how to work around a faulty screen tho. It’s damage by moisture on the edges, so I can’t see shit during installation
Nothing screams “Workstation” louder than Reddit Mobile.
Poor choice of word eh? 😅
Try icewm
No, I prefer i3
Hey, IceWM is awesome! I’d use it but I prefer not to have an extra mouse cluttering up my desk :)
Thank you)
I’m still surprised there are 32 bit apps out there that are supported still. It’s good to know there are people who are working to prevent e-waste.
Also that links2 thing is quite interesting.
There’s quite a few. I have bunsenlabs helium installed on a 32 bit pentium M laptop. It’s very usable, for a 20 yo single core machine. For basic things, it’s still fine. I do have some gpu acceleration though which is a benefit.
I believe you could use qemu for 64-bit emulation on a 32-bit system
Also that links2 thing is quite interesting.
It’s a CLI program that can browse websites (only reads HTML). It can even display images, download files, etc… A lightweight and fast little webpage loader, I love it :)
The old.lemmy.world frontend (also old… on other instances) works in links2.
There’s currently no other way to browse Lemmy in a text browser on a TTY that actually works, I’ve tried them all recently (including browsh, carbonyl, neonmodem).With the amount of Linux nerds on Lemmy, I’m shocked there’s an a TUI client for it.
Maybe I’ll have to make one someday.
There is one (Neonmodem), and it seems to work for some, but it never showed any posts when I tried it, and I tried it on several different distros, client versions, Lemmy accounts and home instances.
This works. Thanks a lot!
Hmm, wonder if I should attempt to do the same for my old Intel Laptop; currently not using because the Disk Read / Write seems pretty slow (HDD, constantly at 100%)
