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Shawdow194 ,
@Shawdow194@kbin.run avatar

SSD upgrade

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

And then ZRAM and swap like hell

ReversalHatchery ,

Won’t that kill the SSD on short notice? Or can they make do with it for years?

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

I mean, worth the tradeoff? Zram would just make the cpu work more. Swap… kill the ssd

But over time. SSDs can handle a lot, like a couple of years?

DaPorkchop_ ,

Won’t be a couple of years if you’re constantly swapping, no.

ReversalHatchery ,

Not really, if you would spend a lot more on SDD drives instead of getting a modern computer

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

Do you have numbers? I dont think its that dramatic

ctenidium ,

I thought it’s either swap or ZRAM - could you use both at the same time?

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

Yes Fedora uses swap and zram by default. Just compresses the memory in RAM (more memory available) and on disk (less data written, less wear)

ctenidium ,

Wow, that’s supercool actually! I had no idea…

Omega_Jimes ,

This will be the single biggest change you can make. Swapping an hdd for a cheap 256gb ssd will make a bigger difference than any DE changes.

ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

Slitaz should need only ~60MB of RAM to run. Wireless networking probably won’t work out of the box, tho.

You can also try either MenuetOS or Kolibri, both are super tiny.

possiblylinux127 , (edited )

Do not run Slitaz as is fully of security problems and vulnerabilities. What’s worse is that there website has security holes on it. There is a page on the bug tracker that runs arbitrary JavaScript and prints out the time as an example. It also has been abandoned and is no longer maintained all that well.

1gb of ram is quiet a bit. I’ve ran Debian Xfce4 on simular hardware it it works with a few tabs. The problem is the modern internet is graphics heavy and the old GPU doesn’t have a lot of power. If you don’t block ads with Ublock origin it will grind to a halt as the video and image rendering will be done by the CPU as the GPU is to old.

ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

I’ve ran Debian Xfce4 on simular hardware

OP did say he tried Debian with xfce and it was slow, I don’t see the point in insisting on using that

possiblylinux127 ,

Because it isn’t going to be faster to use something else else. Unless they added a ton of stuff it shouldn’t use more than a quarter of the ram. Firefox suspends tabs under ram pressure so that shouldn’t be an issue either.

I’ve done work on a old Atom with 1gb of ram. It isn’t fast but it gets the job done. You can’t just make old hardware run fast by changing the desktop

muhyb ,

You can try something like antiX but it won’t do good as a desktop. I use my netbook as a home server with pi-hole in it.

idk_a_cool_username ,

Try antix. its requirements are 256mb ram. And it’s actually usable.

possiblylinux127 ,

It isn’t going to be faster than Debian. I think the issue is the GPU not supporting modern encoding which leads to the CPU doing everything the GPU is suppost to do

eugenia ,
@eugenia@lemmy.ml avatar

You need something like DamnSmallLinux, not Debian. Debian users about 800 MB of RAM with XFce, on a clean boot. It requires a minimum of 2 GB with a modern browser (one tab, 4+ GB with more tabs). DamnSmallLinux uses about 128 MB RAM on a clean boot, and with the Netfront browser about half a gig. Definitely better for such a laptop than any modern distro.

clubb ,
@clubb@lemmy.world avatar

Antix linux would also work great, and DSL is based on it.

Red_sun_in_the_sky ,
@Red_sun_in_the_sky@hexbear.net avatar

Someone suggested antix. I second that. Try it. They got 32 bit version.

bloodfart ,

Compile your own kernel for those atom processors and they work much better.

It’s not hard, there’s a text interface for it where you just pick what to do from a list.

possiblylinux127 ,

That will only speed it up slightly at best and at worse it will be slower

ReversalHatchery ,

I’ve never compiled my kernel so I’m not familiar with what is happening there, but why could that be faster? Is it only installing drivers for present devices, or what is happening?

bloodfart ,

I can’t remember off the top of my head because it’s been a long while, but there’s some weird option inside the configurator that accounts for one of the things the early atom line doesn’t have that the default kernel expects out of x86 or x64 processors.

Of course, any binary program that was compiled with the expectation of that capacity would also have weird hangs and slowness, but (like I said, a while ago) that didn’t tend to cause a 1.3ghz atom to be slower than a 700mhz pentium m.

Quazatron ,
@Quazatron@lemmy.world avatar

I have something like that running Haiku. Try it, you’ll be surprised.

polskilumalo ,
@polskilumalo@lemmygrad.ml avatar

I have a similar but dual core Atom netbook. The thing I did was put an SSD into it, and then installing bare Debian. I chose no graphical system from the installer. From there I installed i3 as the window manager and launched it with an automatic login script checking if I was on TTY1.

That’s all I did, basically keeping the stuff the little thing has to run to an absolute minimum, and a fully fledged desktop environment would have set it on fire.

thayer , (edited )

If that’s one of those old 10" netbooks, I had good experiences running dwm and xmonad on mine back in the day (had an Acer and later an MSI Wind U120(?)). Typically ran all my apps maximized, one per desktop. Firefox did okay, but this was around 2010-2012. Mostly stuck with terminal apps and it was more than snappy enough.

Some screenshots from days past…

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/e4b532cb-6a80-43e6-984b-73e6d1417e0a.png

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/81b41305-20d2-4892-9f39-3d8992260208.png

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/9f4d2b98-6059-468c-bebe-47898a412666.png

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/1bcf8091-796c-4c88-b995-da7523ce6169.png

jagermo ,

Ohhh, the MSI Wind. One of my favorite devices, so much value for money. Loved it

thayer ,

Me too! I can’t recall now why I parted with it, but I wish I hadn’t. Would love to see what it could do today.

jagermo ,

RAM broke and was soldered in :(

halm , (edited )
@halm@leminal.space avatar

Maybe try Openbox instead of XFCE. Can’t promise it’ll add much memory but with 1gb RAM I guess every bit counts?

Edit: just had a quick look around, and it looks like your machine can be upgraded to a whopping 2gb RAM… It’s still not great, but it is a 100% increase in memory.

Edit 2: I’m not actually recommending you buy RAM from memorystock.com, it just turned up at the top of my search results. The page should give you the type and version you’ll need to look for, though.

AlligatorBlizzard ,

2 gb memory should make XFCE usable. That’s what my crappy laptop has and XFCE works fine. I use Firefox with a few open tabs and watch YouTube at 720p.

Trainguyrom ,

I once swapped a Debian install with XFCE to just running Openbox instead of a full DE and got down to 300Mb or so of memory usage. This was about a decade ago so obviously YMMV but given literally all I did was run Debian with just openbox and no DE, there’s probably additional tuning to be done that can get them to a more usable state

ewigkaiwelo ,

Try Bodhi Linux - you can burn it to CD/USB or copy it on a Ventoy USB stick to test before installing and it is available for 32 bit systems

quantumcog ,
@quantumcog@sh.itjust.works avatar

I have a similar device Intel atom, 1gb RAM. I installed arch and use it as a headless computer (without DE/WM). If I need WM I use sway. Use a minimal browser like Qutebrowser. Although it would also run like shit but better than chrome/firefox.

ryannathans ,

Zram

kuneho ,
@kuneho@lemmy.world avatar

If you use mechanical hard drive in it, it worth a try to replace it with an SSD. After that, Debian should run much better.

pastermil ,

Hopefully it got standard SATA connector.

kuneho ,
@kuneho@lemmy.world avatar

without any checking of course, I assumed that machine is “new enough” to have some form of SATA in it, but good point

pastermil ,

Yeah the machine is 32-bit, so it’s a question worth asking.

infeeeee ,

You can buy IDE m.2 converter. There are usb to floppy converters, usb drive shows up as floppy drive. You can attach modern peripherals to old computers, this kind of retro world with modern and old parts mixed is funny.

kuneho ,
@kuneho@lemmy.world avatar

Would it worth, though? I mean, is there a significant difference on IDE between HDD or SSD? With an adapter, SATA speeds on the long run would be bottlenecked by IDE if I’m correct.

rimu ,
@rimu@piefed.social avatar

Still worth it, for the latency elimination alone. But also I expect a SSD would saturate the IDE connection whereas a HDD rarely would.

infeeeee , (edited )

Yeah, it’s not quick, there is no noticeable difference in speed. Random read should be much quicker. But you can’t really buy ide hdds anymore and they will die sooner or later, and the price of small m.2 sata ssds are falling.

claudiom ,

I can speak from experience that it is worth it. It won’t be a super speed demon, but it will make it somewhat more usable. I’ve done so with my Asus Eee PC 901 netbook which has the two PATA SSDs. Those SSDs are SUPER slow compared to the cheapest mSATA SSD you can find with more than double the space, and all you need is a MiniPCI-to-mSATA adapter (the Eee PC 901’s drive slots are MiniPCI). I documented all about it here: …wordpress.com/…/my-geeeky-experiment-part-3/

I’m running OpenBSD/i386 on mine which isn’t as fast as something like Linux, but it definitely felt faster even with OpenBSD after the hardware upgrade. I also increased the RAM to 2 GB which is the maximum amount supported.

MonkderDritte ,

Time flies, where a HDD is barely enough to run a minimal Linux.

Trainguyrom ,

I acquired an ewaste laptop with an 8 year old celeron, 4GB of memory and a 500GB HDD. I tossed Linux Mint on there as an experiment to see what would work decently on there. Its not great, but its usable and might become my daughter’s first computer. Running firefox its noticably slow but I can crack open Libre Office or ScummVM and other than the initial load time it’s pretty snappy. I kinda forgot how hard drives give systems that slow-then-fast feeling…

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