Anybody have good guides on repurposing old 32bit laptops?

3 years ago by albigu to c/technology

I have this 11 year old oddly resistant Pentium laptop and I'm thinking of turning it into a reading/light-programming tool. It used to run great back in the day but modern software has gotten so bloated that it can barely run GNOME with Firefox, so I was thinking of sticking to command line only. Is there anything specific I should look into?

In specific I mainly only want to be able to download and read mdbooks in the terminal, probably using archlinux32 as the OS (or maybe LFS?). Captcha abuse and all that javascript already ruined browsing with Lynx so I have little hopes of actually browsing the web. I also intend to get a new battery as it only lasts 1-2 hours nowadays. Any other 32bit/tty-only customisation guides are also welcome.

PolandIsAStateOfMind 10 points 3 years ago

If it still works, it make for good cat bed. At least my cat think so.

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AlbigensianGhoul 6 points 3 years ago

Every thing can be a cat bed if the human really needs to use it right now.

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furnace 5 points 3 years ago

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AlbigensianGhoul 3 points 3 years ago

Antix looks pretty good and that article is fantastic. Thanks!

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AlbigensianGhoul 1 point 3 years ago

Hey, small follow-up, how does Antix compare to Arch? As in, I've never used a systemd-less distro before, anything specific I need to be aware of. I'll probably go with it just because it seems so lightweight and like a good learning experience.

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furnace 2 points 3 years ago

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yewler 5 points 3 years ago

I revived an old laptop with arch and the i3 window manager which worked quite nice with my use case. I used vim for coding and qutebrowser for web browsing. I'm sure there's a lightweight reading app that you can use from the keyboard, to complete the "never take your hands off the keyboard" vibe, if you're anything like me and that sounds appealing.

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Imnecomrade 4 points 3 years ago

I haven't been able or had the time to get the Nxyt browser--built in Lisp--to effectively work on my Gentoo machine, but I thought I should mention it because it looks like a nifty browser. I have been wanting to try w3m for a console web browser as well.

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yewler 3 points 3 years ago

Oo that Nyxt browser looks right up my alley. I'll have to give that a shot.

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yewler 3 points 3 years ago

Oo that Nyxt browser looks right up my alley. I'll have to give that a shot.

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ComradeEd 3 points 3 years ago

Debian with xfce.

I say this, because for a (quite short) time I ran that on an 32bit Centrino Duo, T60 (which is 16 years old at this point).

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sparkingcircuit 1 point 3 years ago

Furthermore, I'd recommend disabling the compositor. This disables animations, transparency, etc, however it speeds up the experience drastically on antiquated hardware. This is what I use (with almost no other changes) on an old netbook with 512mb of ram and a single core CPU.

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ComradeEd 2 points 3 years ago

I'm lucky, mine has 3gb ram and 2 cores, so it works just fine without any changes.

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Imnecomrade 3 points 3 years ago

I haven't found any worthwhile guides yet, but if you have a beefier machine, you could consider Gentoo and set up a crossdev environment to compile packages for the older x86 machine, and then copy the binaries over (which I think is done automatically, I have yet to do this myself).

I also wonder how well a window manager like dwm would run on the machine.

Also, tmpfs, (Arch/Gentoo) is a filesystem that you could put files and directories temporarily into RAM/swap to greatly improve their access times. If you manage to make a small enough linux installation and have enough RAM available, you could consider putting most, if not all, of your files in tmpfs. I tried running old machines on RAM in the past, and the performance improvement is quite impressive.

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AlbigensianGhoul 3 points 3 years ago

I have a good desktop which I'm thinking of turning into a server, so that sounds like a great idea! I think dwm might run well by itself since LXDE also works nicely right now, but the issue with a GUI is that I also have to rely on the other graphical programs to be efficient to make good use of my limited memory and processing. Also using a touchpad for long periods of time hurts my hand, so I'd rather just avoid clicking/scrolling unless absolutely necessary.

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Imnecomrade 3 points 3 years ago

I just figured dwm would just make it convenient to use multiple terminal windows if you do not need any GUI applications, and I think zellij (zellij is not built for x86, just amd64) or tmux/screen will work in vt as an alternative.

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AlbigensianGhoul 4 points 3 years ago

Yeah, I can't live without tmux already. On second thought I might actually try dwm only so that I can also run some lightweight pdf reader, but I'll have to see how much better it'll be than just reading on the phone.

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nour 4 points 3 years ago

I found mupdf quite a good PDF reader. Only downside is that it can't display table of contents.

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Imnecomrade 3 points 3 years ago

I recommend zathura for a lightweight pdf reader.

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