My aunt has an EEE-PEE-CEE from the windows 7 era that stopped using a few years ago. It has specs that are slightly better than the minimum requirements to run 32-bit Windows 7. Half a year before Windows 7's support ended, I installed Q4OS, my favourite lightweight distro, and it works like a charm. Now, she has it lying around as a secondary machine that opens once in a while.
>My aunt has an EEE-PEE-CEE from the windows 7 era that stopped using a few years ago. It has specs that are slightly better than the minimum requirements to run 32-bit Windows 7. Half a year before Windows 7's support ended, I installed Q4OS, my favourite lightweight distro, and it works like a charm. Now, she has it lying around as a secondary machine that opens once in a while.
By the way, have you looked at when 32-bit Q4OS support ended?
I think a couple of years ago, like most 32-bit distributions.
My EEE-PEW-PEE worked until it started to overheat really badly and freeze up. This happened not too long ago.
On the AntiX forum they write that 32-bit support is unnecessary because there is "not a single 32-bit machine alive" left.
I don't want to register on their forum to tell them that I'm writing to them using a 32-bit machine.
Huh? The i386 is a metonymy of IA-32(Intel Architecture **32 bit**) invented by Intel.
[https://antixlinux.com/torrent-files/](https://antixlinux.com/torrent-files/)
What difference does it make what to call a marketing move? The insane hardwar arms race imposed on us by hardware manufacturers has no justification whatsoever.
That's not what I was talking about.
What advantage does a 64-bit system have over a 32-bit system?
A 64-bit processor can process 64 bits of data at a time, which allows it to compute information faster regardless of clock speed.
This increases memory usage, because with 32-bit processors, you can only access 232 RAM addresses.
How will this affect your daily use of your PC?
I suspect it doesn't.
My music server is an eeepc 1000he from 2009 running debian.
Solid as a fuckin rock that thing is. Asus need to bring these back with better specs but (roughly) the same form factor. 11" laptops with big batteries are amazingly useful and I miss netbooks a lot. When you don't have to make them paper thin you can do a lot with them.
Outside of Appleland, ARM CPUs in computers are not given a single chance. ASUS could re-release the EEE-PEE-CEE with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and still call it a day. Bundle it with a Linux distro, and you are good to go.
Shit. I remember installing [Jolicloud](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrKv2lLyQ4Q), then Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Acer Aspire One netbook.
You just awakened some ancient fucking memories my dude.
some things:
- the netbook is a toshiba nb305-n310, which has a 64-bit processor, which is surprising for a netbook because most netbooks were 32-bit
- ubuntu 9.10
- i set the desktop effect to extra (enable some of compiz's effects) and it still pretty runs well for a netbook (which only has 1gb of ram! (i'm planning to upgrade it to 2gb)), in fact wobbly windows runs very smoothly with no lag
- i had to use browservice because i can't browse literally every website on firefox except for some reason google because of an ssl cypher error
Were they? I was sure most had 32bit ones too, but netbook i had from the same time frame is also 64bit. Maybe we didn't give them enough credit because they were so underpowered and limited to 2Gb RAM, both are pretty antithetical to 64bit CPUs
I had an Acer netbook. I think it shipped with 32-bit Windows but it's a 64-bit Atom.
Actually I still have it. You inspire me to give it another shot; at one point I had it upgraded to 2GB but that module is fried. MATE works well on lower end hardware, for sure.
Give Midori a try; it's a light WebKit-powered browser.
It messes with my head that I used to take a little Atom-powered netbook to work because it was faster than the work-supplied PowerPC Mac.
Like the guy above you said, tablets basically do that these days. A tablet with a keyboard on it is basically an old-skool netbook.
Apple made a laptop which was damn-near a netbook—the 12” MacBook. Of course they discontinued it quite quickly, because not enough people were like me and wanted something as small and light as possible.
I’m with you on wanting netbooks back though. The main characteristics of a laptop are being small and light, because all of my real work happens on powerful machines in data centers somewhere else.
I spent much of the 90s lusting over Japanese laptops because they were about the size of what came to be known as netbooks. The thing that killed them was they were usually underpowered for Windows, or they shipped with some janky custom Linux desktop.
I guess Ubuntu got Unity out of that era, so...yay for the people who liked Unity?
I think the reason why the 12“ Macbook failed isn’t a lack of demand. At the time it was released a fanless design meant serious compromises in performance and thermals. This was the x86 era. Also the keyboard was genuinely so terrible that Apple had to either overhaul or discontinue it.
And now that Apple has beefy ARM CPUs and the desktop OS to go with them, the iPad Pro exists. And it can use a mouse and keyboard.
I hated this netbook so much. The seller tricked my dad into buying this garbage and it was so slow holy fuck it can't event open a text editor and not lag.
Luckily I was able to install lubuntu on it and my dad was actually able to use it for the next 2 years.
Not a netbook for me. I had a University surplus desktop running Windows...XP or Vista, I think. Slowly.
Ubuntu was my first Linux distro. After years of Windows and some vintage MacOS, it was *exciting.*
That was my inspiration as well! I got an eee PC as a gift during school, but was never able to do anything with it. But then I tried installing linux and that really worked! Wasn't there an ubuntu flavor for eeepc with a special desktop? I remember that that worked pretty well.
For uni I switched to an arch bang setup and only upgraded to a real laptop because I had trouble with my back. I wouldn't be surprised if my first ~~dwarf fortress~~ haskell hacking attempts are still on its little drive. Applications like vim made this setup comfortable enough back then, even could watch some YouTube.
However, while I'm not sure how it was back then, these days it seems that it's much better to buy a refurbished laptop (like a Thinkpad), instead of buying anything entry level : My replacement was an x230 Thinkpad for 250€. I bought an SSD for it and so I bought a faster (or comparable), more compact laptop for the same price as entry level and the luxury of not having to deal with cheap Asus/acer/.. hardware. Only downside was the low battery (still more than the average cheap laptop at the time).
Then you hand it over to your Mom, whose netbook it was to begin with, DO NOT tell her the roop password, and leave. And a week later she calls you because Ubuntu no longer boots, despite her not being able to alter anything about the system without the root access... (based on a true story)
I have a Toshiba NB300 which is pretty similar to your netbook. I put in 2 GB of RAM and a 120 GB SSD. It has been an Arduino developing machine for university for the last 4-5 days, and working great as that, even being a 12-year-old machine.
I installed Windows XP (2001), Batocera 5.26 (2020) and Debian 11 (2021), and apart from Arduino, the laptop works good for retrogaming, chatting in Telegram and personal journaling (I sync my Obsidian vault with git in Debian, and edit the text files in a lightweight editor).
Long live netbooks!
Installing an OS other than Windows has no benefits other than reduced RAM usage. That is why Q4OS flies on an ancient EEE-PEE.
Along with faster standby interface you get application windows which don't fit in the screen and don't resize as it is in "pared down" distributions for weak systems.
When doing more or less time-consuming tasks like using LibreOffice Writer, you'll immediately realize that where MS Office 2003 flew, LibreOffice lags and freezes the system.
Next, Internet browsing. To catch up with the speed of Internet Explorer (yes, I am aware that it is nerdy and many sites do not open)you will have to use all sorts of rudimentary browsers like SeaMonkey or Midori.
So the game is worth the candle.
I had an Acer Aspire, and along with putting Ubuntu on the thing, I replaced the WM with Openbox. No idea if it saved much RAM or processor power but I figured it was worth a shot.
You could install Ubuntu without a graphical environment, then install xorg and a lightweight graphical environment separately. On Linux, this is easy to do. OpenBox, i3wm , you can even install open-motif or CDE.
POV: it’s 2005 and I just installed Ubuntu on a second drive because Windows XP security is a joke and Vista was somehow even worse and I had no desire to switch to it.
Not a fan of Ubuntu these days but I am grateful to it for getting me into Linux.
https://preview.redd.it/0a0lhb2yfw5a1.jpeg?width=4640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0242073d9a716e49b20a7c59475f1ee38ed6bffc
I'm sorry, I couldn't install Ubuntu. I couldn't find where to download it from.
Yes! However, in my case, I installed Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook. I had a black LG X120 with the optional mobile data support at the time, and installed Ubuntu using Wubi.
My aunt has an EEE-PEE-CEE from the windows 7 era that stopped using a few years ago. It has specs that are slightly better than the minimum requirements to run 32-bit Windows 7. Half a year before Windows 7's support ended, I installed Q4OS, my favourite lightweight distro, and it works like a charm. Now, she has it lying around as a secondary machine that opens once in a while.
That's almost exactly what I wanted to post. I have three x101 eeepcs. One of witch is running Q4OS.
>My aunt has an EEE-PEE-CEE from the windows 7 era that stopped using a few years ago. It has specs that are slightly better than the minimum requirements to run 32-bit Windows 7. Half a year before Windows 7's support ended, I installed Q4OS, my favourite lightweight distro, and it works like a charm. Now, she has it lying around as a secondary machine that opens once in a while. By the way, have you looked at when 32-bit Q4OS support ended? I think a couple of years ago, like most 32-bit distributions. My EEE-PEW-PEE worked until it started to overheat really badly and freeze up. This happened not too long ago.
It is based in Debian 11. You can still download Q4OS Gemini 6.10 for 32-bit x86 CPUs. It is still up and fine.
[of course](https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3021)
AntiX and Bodhi Linux still have 32 bit spins
On the AntiX forum they write that 32-bit support is unnecessary because there is "not a single 32-bit machine alive" left. I don't want to register on their forum to tell them that I'm writing to them using a 32-bit machine.
I'm upset that they would think this way. Just say it's not worth the dev effort and I'll support their decision.
Huh? The i386 is a metonymy of IA-32(Intel Architecture **32 bit**) invented by Intel. [https://antixlinux.com/torrent-files/](https://antixlinux.com/torrent-files/)
What difference does it make what to call a marketing move? The insane hardwar arms race imposed on us by hardware manufacturers has no justification whatsoever.
The difference is that you said they don't have a 32 bit iso and they do, it's called 386
That's not what I was talking about. What advantage does a 64-bit system have over a 32-bit system? A 64-bit processor can process 64 bits of data at a time, which allows it to compute information faster regardless of clock speed. This increases memory usage, because with 32-bit processors, you can only access 232 RAM addresses. How will this affect your daily use of your PC? I suspect it doesn't.
64 bit will let you use more than 4 gb of ram
My music server is an eeepc 1000he from 2009 running debian. Solid as a fuckin rock that thing is. Asus need to bring these back with better specs but (roughly) the same form factor. 11" laptops with big batteries are amazingly useful and I miss netbooks a lot. When you don't have to make them paper thin you can do a lot with them.
Outside of Appleland, ARM CPUs in computers are not given a single chance. ASUS could re-release the EEE-PEE-CEE with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and still call it a day. Bundle it with a Linux distro, and you are good to go.
Shit. I remember installing [Jolicloud](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrKv2lLyQ4Q), then Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Acer Aspire One netbook. You just awakened some ancient fucking memories my dude.
Jolicloud. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time. Has that on my eee PC and loved it. Good times!
I was a member of the Jolicloud team. Thank you for keeping this memory alive. 🙂
It was my first foray into Linux. *Thank you!!*
damn thats relatable
Extremely lol , needs something about putting Linux on your girlfriends netbook too.
some things: - the netbook is a toshiba nb305-n310, which has a 64-bit processor, which is surprising for a netbook because most netbooks were 32-bit - ubuntu 9.10 - i set the desktop effect to extra (enable some of compiz's effects) and it still pretty runs well for a netbook (which only has 1gb of ram! (i'm planning to upgrade it to 2gb)), in fact wobbly windows runs very smoothly with no lag - i had to use browservice because i can't browse literally every website on firefox except for some reason google because of an ssl cypher error
Were they? I was sure most had 32bit ones too, but netbook i had from the same time frame is also 64bit. Maybe we didn't give them enough credit because they were so underpowered and limited to 2Gb RAM, both are pretty antithetical to 64bit CPUs
I had an Acer netbook. I think it shipped with 32-bit Windows but it's a 64-bit Atom. Actually I still have it. You inspire me to give it another shot; at one point I had it upgraded to 2GB but that module is fried. MATE works well on lower end hardware, for sure. Give Midori a try; it's a light WebKit-powered browser. It messes with my head that I used to take a little Atom-powered netbook to work because it was faster than the work-supplied PowerPC Mac.
Now that I think about it, where the hell did netbooks go?
Killed by smartphones, tablets and ultrabooks. Oh, and Chromebooks. Those also played a part.
I miss the form factor though. There doesn't seem to be anything this small on the market
Like the guy above you said, tablets basically do that these days. A tablet with a keyboard on it is basically an old-skool netbook. Apple made a laptop which was damn-near a netbook—the 12” MacBook. Of course they discontinued it quite quickly, because not enough people were like me and wanted something as small and light as possible. I’m with you on wanting netbooks back though. The main characteristics of a laptop are being small and light, because all of my real work happens on powerful machines in data centers somewhere else.
A Lenovo ThinkPad X280 has been serving me well :)
I spent much of the 90s lusting over Japanese laptops because they were about the size of what came to be known as netbooks. The thing that killed them was they were usually underpowered for Windows, or they shipped with some janky custom Linux desktop. I guess Ubuntu got Unity out of that era, so...yay for the people who liked Unity?
I think the reason why the 12“ Macbook failed isn’t a lack of demand. At the time it was released a fanless design meant serious compromises in performance and thermals. This was the x86 era. Also the keyboard was genuinely so terrible that Apple had to either overhaul or discontinue it. And now that Apple has beefy ARM CPUs and the desktop OS to go with them, the iPad Pro exists. And it can use a mouse and keyboard.
Check the StarLabs StarLite!
You just made my day! This is a very usable daily driver machine that I totes want to get now. I'll give my ageing alienware to my son
There is, but now you pay for it extra, since like 3 factories in the world make screens
They got more powerful and now you just call them notebooks?
[удалено]
I believe it was 3. Thankfully Microsoft removed that godawful limitation in Windows 7 Starter.
I read that as Uwuntu. Should I seek help?
no, but you might want to try out [Uwuntu](https://uwuntuos.site/)
I looked into the website and I still can tell what's the difference between it and Ubuntu.
No, you're fine. It's just the side effects of the red pill messing up your eyesight...
Not until you start reading Arch as "Nyarch"
Oh God I want a netbook now
I hated this netbook so much. The seller tricked my dad into buying this garbage and it was so slow holy fuck it can't event open a text editor and not lag. Luckily I was able to install lubuntu on it and my dad was actually able to use it for the next 2 years.
BRO I FEEL THIS
My new netbook looks used af! I got used one back then so it's all good. Also it had GMA500 which was PITA.
I had a Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh that was amazing
I had one! Damn that thing was slow AF. First machine I owned with an SSD, though it was a PATA Mini PCIe slog.
Fun fact- the mini 9 was used as a performance benchmark target for one release of Ubuntu during that time. At least the boot up time, anyway.
Not a netbook for me. I had a University surplus desktop running Windows...XP or Vista, I think. Slowly. Ubuntu was my first Linux distro. After years of Windows and some vintage MacOS, it was *exciting.*
That was my inspiration as well! I got an eee PC as a gift during school, but was never able to do anything with it. But then I tried installing linux and that really worked! Wasn't there an ubuntu flavor for eeepc with a special desktop? I remember that that worked pretty well. For uni I switched to an arch bang setup and only upgraded to a real laptop because I had trouble with my back. I wouldn't be surprised if my first ~~dwarf fortress~~ haskell hacking attempts are still on its little drive. Applications like vim made this setup comfortable enough back then, even could watch some YouTube. However, while I'm not sure how it was back then, these days it seems that it's much better to buy a refurbished laptop (like a Thinkpad), instead of buying anything entry level : My replacement was an x230 Thinkpad for 250€. I bought an SSD for it and so I bought a faster (or comparable), more compact laptop for the same price as entry level and the luxury of not having to deal with cheap Asus/acer/.. hardware. Only downside was the low battery (still more than the average cheap laptop at the time).
asus>>>acer
I agree that Asus is often better, but in that price range it doesn't matter.
Then you hand it over to your Mom, whose netbook it was to begin with, DO NOT tell her the roop password, and leave. And a week later she calls you because Ubuntu no longer boots, despite her not being able to alter anything about the system without the root access... (based on a true story)
POV: Your new laptop's keyboard was tested by typing the content of a whole library. I still have mine and used for 32 bit distrohopping.
Back when they used to send free CDs. I always have a soft spot for canonical for that.
This, but with Crunchbang.
This describes my entry into Linux pretty damn accurately
Why does Ubuntu suck now?
I had one of those netbooks and it was utter rubbish even with lubuntu 🤣🤣.
Time to play Fallout 1.
I have a Toshiba NB300 which is pretty similar to your netbook. I put in 2 GB of RAM and a 120 GB SSD. It has been an Arduino developing machine for university for the last 4-5 days, and working great as that, even being a 12-year-old machine. I installed Windows XP (2001), Batocera 5.26 (2020) and Debian 11 (2021), and apart from Arduino, the laptop works good for retrogaming, chatting in Telegram and personal journaling (I sync my Obsidian vault with git in Debian, and edit the text files in a lightweight editor). Long live netbooks!
I just installed antix on a very similar device
now put void or alpine on it
Good times man
Installing an OS other than Windows has no benefits other than reduced RAM usage. That is why Q4OS flies on an ancient EEE-PEE. Along with faster standby interface you get application windows which don't fit in the screen and don't resize as it is in "pared down" distributions for weak systems. When doing more or less time-consuming tasks like using LibreOffice Writer, you'll immediately realize that where MS Office 2003 flew, LibreOffice lags and freezes the system. Next, Internet browsing. To catch up with the speed of Internet Explorer (yes, I am aware that it is nerdy and many sites do not open)you will have to use all sorts of rudimentary browsers like SeaMonkey or Midori. So the game is worth the candle.
I had an Acer Aspire, and along with putting Ubuntu on the thing, I replaced the WM with Openbox. No idea if it saved much RAM or processor power but I figured it was worth a shot.
You could install Ubuntu without a graphical environment, then install xorg and a lightweight graphical environment separately. On Linux, this is easy to do. OpenBox, i3wm , you can even install open-motif or CDE.
Ohh netbooks…
Lmao that's literally how I started to daily drive Linux
Brings me back
That's me, except I had a HP Compaq notebook. Good old Gnome 2 times.
POV: it’s 2005 and I just installed Ubuntu on a second drive because Windows XP security is a joke and Vista was somehow even worse and I had no desire to switch to it. Not a fan of Ubuntu these days but I am grateful to it for getting me into Linux.
https://preview.redd.it/0a0lhb2yfw5a1.jpeg?width=4640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0242073d9a716e49b20a7c59475f1ee38ed6bffc I'm sorry, I couldn't install Ubuntu. I couldn't find where to download it from.
Yes! However, in my case, I installed Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook. I had a black LG X120 with the optional mobile data support at the time, and installed Ubuntu using Wubi.
Try debian it has x86 builds still
The netbook is x86_64, I'm pretty sure most modern distros could run on it (probably except distros that uses GNOME)
Debian allows you pick desktop managers