Hi!
Someone asked me to revive their 20 year old laptop as its no longer working on their installation of windows XP.
This baby has around 512MB of Ram, 1.6 GHZ Intel Atom.
This is my first time doing something with hardware older than myself so I’d love some insight from people around.
There was recently another user asking the same for a similar machine on the .ml Linux comm.
As I did there, I can only tell you I successfully ran antix on a similarly old eee-pc from 2007ish, with the same CPU. It did have 1gb of ram though iirc, but the distro ran fairly comfortably (until it came to browsing with many tabs open).
Cute!!
Have you considered freeDOS? Would run rral snappy on there. Im doing that with my p3 64mb ram gateway.
Do you have a NIC that accepts DOS-based drivers or are you surviving without internet on it?
DSL or one of the Puppy flavors.
Emphasis mine. Wow, only 2 GiB…
That’s not as low as you’d think, to be fair. I’ve tried to run Kubuntu on a 10 year old laptop with 2 GiB RAM and it worked, if only a little laggy. That being said, it crashes after half an hour without swap. But with swap, it is legitimately daily drivable (as long as you don’t run heavy apps, of course).
I’d imagine a distro that’s designed to be even more lightweight would be able to handle that.
I’m gonna anti-recommend TinyCore unless you’re an advanced user. The wiki is a trap full of outdated info spread across several different versions of the OS.
One thing you could try is Alpine Linux It is surprisingly lightweight, and pair it with something like OpenBox or maybe XFCE, and it might be quite good
Just installed MiniOS on my 15 year old Dell Ultrabook. Small, fast and light.
512MB of Ram
Arch does technically „„run”” on it™
Otherwise regarding the CPU, I would set up a gentoo with distcc on it, since you dont be daily driving the thing anyways
RAM will be an issue if they want a Desktop Environment. It would be good to find out max RAM that machine supported and purchase a replacement stick.
If you can get at least 2gig you might have an OK platform.
If you can’t increase RAM then there is a cool project called HaikuOS that is super lightweight, they have some popular packages for it, butitd is not a Linux distro with tons of availabe apps. Its got a late 90s feel to it.
I’d be surprised if it could do even a gig.
The nb100 can go to 2gb of ddr2 but is only single channel, so it can’t go to 3.25/4gb (32 bit cpu limit)
Puppy Linux might be an option if that project is still going.
Tiny Core
This is the answer. Tiny Core is absolute best for old hardware as it gets running upto speed quickly takes very little resources and you can see what kind of resources it consumes and can add things to it to make it useful.
Doesn’t Tiny Core load into RAM? With 512 MB that could be a problem. There are many versions of Puppy Linux. I think they load into RAM also. I would try MX Linux and see if that worked. Expanding the amount of RAM would be helpful, but it is not worth spending money on that machine. I bought a functioning Fujitsu laptop with a 6th gen Core i5 Processor and 8 GB RAM for $80 on Ebay. Computers with a 7th gen Intel Core Processor or older won’t officially run Windows 11 so they are selling for cheap these days, if you shop around.
Tiny Core can loadit self into RAM, but it doesn’t have to, you can do a normal install as well. Also even if you want to run it from RAM, it only takes 46MB in RAM not ideal but manageable with 512MB. Also you can even downgrade if you are not UI dependent, you can install the core (non-tiny version) and only needs 26MB RAM.
Also consider Windows XP requires 200 MB of RAM to function, before we run any apps at all, so Tiny taking 46 MB to run leaves a huge headroom.
Justin Bieber OS. Biebian > Debian
Check if that’s an 64-bit capable CPU, otherwise that will get tricky.
Seems to be an Intel Atom N270 x86
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Toshiba-NB100.12668.0.htmlI suppose I’m sticking to x32 builds no?
Sounds like it, yeah.
https://itsfoss.com/32-bit-linux-distributions/Debian appears to still support x86, and 512 MB memory.
If you can increase the memory, you can consider LMDE, but I suggest sticking to Debian with the extra memory to allow space for a browser and office applications.
I wanted to say tiny Core, but someone gave that. So I’ll give another suggestion. Use something XFCE based or LXQt based. Maybe mint in XFCE De is the way to go if you want a feature rich solution that is light on resources.
Maybe mint
Most ubuntu-based are 1 GiB minimum and dropped support for
x86though.
It’s a 32-bit CPU afaik. Sadly Debian Trixie doesn’t support 32-bit anymore. Old stable Debian Bookworm would be a good option.
Maybe SliTaz? https://www.slitaz.org/en/
Arch Linux 32-bit? https://archlinux32.org/
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