this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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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?

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[–] FQQD@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 58 points 2 months ago (3 children)
[–] maliciousonion@lemmy.ml 42 points 2 months ago

Forgive me father, for I have sinned 🛐

[–] electricprism@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's even funnier because the title uses the word "useful" and then shows a screenshot including reddit -- lol

[–] maliciousonion@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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 😅

[–] electricprism@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago

No worries, really, just made me smirk on seeing lol

[–] TwinTusks@bitforged.space 3 points 2 months ago

To be fair, I have also ventured to reddit several times last few days, mainly for my episode discussion of old tv shows.

[–] halm@leminal.space 15 points 2 months ago

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

[–] sleen@lemmy.zip 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] maliciousonion@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 months ago

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 :)

[–] notthebees@reddthat.com 7 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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).

[–] GlenTheFrog@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] maliciousonion@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago

This works. Thanks a lot!

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You might wanna try out Pale Moon. It's optimized for single-thread performance and takes up a bit less memory.

[–] muhyb@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] Frederic 7 points 2 months ago

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

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

sudo apt-get install intel-media-va-driver-non-free

Video will still be clunky but less clunky.

[–] notthebees@reddthat.com 7 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] nickb333@fedia.io 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Debian is good for this. Enjoy it while there is still 32-bit support though. Edit- do you have any swap configured?

[–] maliciousonion@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

1 extra gig of swap was configured by Debian automatically on install. Should I add more?

[–] notthebees@reddthat.com 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[–] FQQD@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 3 points 2 months ago

I think that seems like a good idea

[–] SitD@lemy.lol 5 points 2 months ago

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

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] maliciousonion@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] shekau@lemmy.today 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Whats the tool/command name in the 1st picture that shows you the resources usage?

[–] maliciousonion@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 months ago

That's just htop, a pretty well-known cli system monitor

Also, if you like htop, youre going to love btop.

[–] zaphod@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 months ago

Looks like htop.

[–] gramgan@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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…

[–] maliciousonion@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[–] Hupf@feddit.org 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] maliciousonion@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Suppoze 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Hupf@feddit.org 3 points 2 months ago

x32 mode may be an option to take advantage of some more registers/instructions, but I'd assume not many distros support that as a platform.

[–] TheL321@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 months ago

I have a netbook with the same CPU and it works, but there are no GPU drivers, even on Windows for x64

[–] bruhsoulz@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago

Man, this is sick.