2mo ago

Turned my shitty Intel Atom 32-bit laptop with just 1GB of RAM into a useful lightweight workstation

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?

60 comments

Ew, R*ddit
- Forgive me father, for I have sinned 🛐
- 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 😅
- To be fair, I have also ventured to reddit several times last few days, mainly for my episode discussion of old tv shows.

Nothing screams "Workstation" louder than Reddit Mobile.
- Poor choice of word eh? 😅

Reddit spotted. 2.5/10 setup.

For your last question, there's the Lemmy terminal viewer — I think it's unmaintained, but it's a start?

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.
- 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 :)
- 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

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!

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 👂
- 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.
- Backup server?

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
  
  you could add another layer of swap in between ram and disk by using zram. as it compresses swap in ram with a very fast compressing algorithm it effectively expands the ram size

You might wanna try out Pale Moon. It's optimized for single-thread performance and takes up a bit less memory.
- Nah, Pale Moon won't cut it. Even Dillo is quite slow on that hardware. qutebrowser maybe. To be fair using TUI-everything (or CLI) is the only viable way.

I also have a netbook with an Atom N2600, I overclocked it from 1.6GHz to 2.0GHz, upgraded from 1GB to 3GB of RAM, and replaced the old HD with an SSD, I then installed MX Linux, 32 bits version, Xfce, and it works pretty well. Only huge webpages are slow, but everything else is about still usable

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.
  
  btop makes the dedicated gpu turn on, wasting energy and disrupting its power saving. yes, this can not be disabled in btop, so it happily shows no load on the gpu. gee, thanks.
- Looks like htop.
- Htop or top

I’m curious why links2 over, 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 me? I have a very similar ASUS with similar hw and it's rocking MX 32bit, if you want more cutting edge stuff, you can switch to 32bit Void (xbps is blazing fast, but the docs aren't Arch-wiki-quality)

sudo apt-get install intel-media-va-driver-non-free
Video will still be clunky but less clunky.
- The atom cpu in this has a powervr sgx545 gpu which is barely supported by anything. Ubuntu 12.04 has some support but it's only 2d acceleration.

It does support 64-bit though?
- Yeah, the processor does. The laptop as a whole doesn't.
  I did some searching and this may be because Asus has disabled the functionality in the BIOS, or much of the peripherals don't support 32-bit. I have no idea what it is tbh, and I don't really care at this point.
  
  With 1GB RAM you're better off with 32bit anyway, as applications will use less memory. Sick setup though, I hate electronic waste so it delights me to see sim old tech getting a second life.
  
  I have a netbook with the same CPU and it works, but there are no GPU drivers, even on Windows for x64
  
  there might be an BIOS update you could try i don't think it will fix 64 bit and even if it did 32bit apps probably take less memory for storing addresses.
  on my AOD255E 64bit just works :tm:

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.

well, you heard the website 😂 now install waydroid and their mobile app

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%)

Man, this is sick.

Did you

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

Try icewm
- No, I prefer i3

60 comments