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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[–] [email protected] 93 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 62 points 3 weeks ago

Forgive me father, for I have sinned 🛐

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks 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 😅

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Nothing screams "Workstation" louder than Reddit Mobile.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Poor choice of word eh? 😅

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Reddit spotted. 2.5/10 setup.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago (3 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks 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 :)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

I believe you could use qemu for 64-bit emulation on a 32-bit system

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 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).

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

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 👂

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Backup server?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks 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?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

I think that seems like a good idea

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks 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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Looks like htop.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (3 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

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:

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

I have an Asus EeePC where the latest BIOS update straight up removed the option for AHCI and hard wired IDE compat mode. Luckily, I had kept the previous version and downgrade was possible.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

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

Video will still be clunky but less clunky.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks 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…

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Man, this is sick.

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