Reviving a 15-Year-Old ASUS Eee PC with Arch Linux 32
Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
I dug out my 2009 ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, which was still running sluggish Windows XP, to give it a second life. Since the Intel Atom processor only supports 32-bit architecture, I installed the community-maintained Arch Linux 32. This guide details the entire process, from preparing boot media and configuring the network to partitioning the disk and setting up a lightweight desktop environment on this vintage hardware.
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.
- drdexebtjl
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.
- stasiu
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!
- 93n
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.
- russfink
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?)
- ezst
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.
- mintflow
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
- nickjj
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.
- trelane
I really miss netbooks. They were an amazing moment for Linux. No surprise Microsoft killed them.