Anyone know of anything fitting an Eeepc?
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Puppy, Porteus, antiX, Q4OS, Slax run on 32-bit x86 and are supposed to be under the 256 MiB RAM mark.
Zorin Lite and Xubuntu ~512MiB.
Mint, LXDE and Bunsenlabs ~1GiB.YMMV
slackware, netbsd, openbsd
edit: i forgot tinycore, you gotta try that too
+1 for NetBSD it’s such a great OS for ressource limited platforms. Rough edges by today standards but it worth a try on OP’s PC.
Edit : would you please post something like neofetch screenshot when your eeepc is up and running ? :)
Not a screenshot since I havent set up any internet communication except package installing yet, but a bad photo is manageble. Now I just have to figure out how to make a specific user that automatically boots into Abiword on login!
Antix,Debian ,arch i386 project
i wouldn’t recommend debian since they’ve dropped 32 bit support in trixie, their latest release. the previous release, bookworm, still supports 32 bits archs, but it eol’s less than a year from now
This is not true. (Edit: nevermind, I was wrong)
They’re dropping support for i586 and below. 32-bit systems with i686+ processors will still run fine.
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.html#reduced-support-for-i386
From trixie, i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems
[…]
Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware.
Not all 32-bit systems are i386. For example, my 32-bit Debian thinkpad runs Trixie just fine. Because it’s i686 which is still supported.
So again, Debian 13 isn’t dropping 32-bit support. Just i586 support and below.
Not all 32-bit systems are i386
but the debian i386 architecture means all 32 bit x86 processors. there’s no “i686” build of debian
there are no i586 or i686 kernel or iso available, you can look for them. i386 packages only exist for compatibility reasons, so you can run 32 bit applications on amd64 machines. please read the release notes
but the debian i386 architecture means all 32 bit x86 processors.
That was very confusing to me. I’m sure they have their reasons, but calling it something like x86 would’ve been more clear to me.
The original x86 platform. Now requires “686” class CPU. Unsupported in trixie and newer except in chroots on amd64 hosts.
I’m sure they have their reasons
maybe compatibility reasons. i guess they used to support i386 back in the day and didn’t want to break the couple of systems that were installed on bo and have been upgrading ever since
I was wrong. Thank you. And I don’t have Trixie on the 32-bit Thinkpad, it was my other laptop.
@ everyone recommending debian: it no longer supports 32 bit x86 machines: https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.html#reduced-support-for-i386
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Bunsenlab Linux…
Though don’t expect miracles, that cpu is too slow for the modern internet. It’s not usable for web browsing on any OS.
I think it should be okay. I have a pentium M machine that did alright with web browsing on Bunsenlabs. Had 2 gb of ram. I used an original eeepc and an MSI u230 wind with the same cpu. The atom and pentium M are about the same
When? Currently 240p youtube will produce frame drops on these. Typical javascript laden web pages can take minutes to render. I guess it largely depends on the websites you plan to visit. Phoronix will work ok.
I also have a gpu in it (ATI mobility Radeon 9700) so there is that. Web browsing was slow but not impossible. I did use discord with my old pentium M machine. (only web bc 32 bit). YouTube did work but not well. I was using smplayer for YouTube. Also this was before everything went to av1 encoding and I haven’t tried it since.
slow internet could make for a fun opportunity to play around with a text-based browser from the terminal like Lynx, w3m, and browsh.
I loved my Eee PC so much.
I’ve been watching and hoping for a modern ARM equivalent, but haven’t seen anything quite right so far.
antiX
That said this machine will not be able to cope with the www of 2025.
I’ve had good luck with Antix on very old machines.
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I’m not familiar with Eee PCs but I’m assuming you’d want something lightweight. Q4OS has a 32-bit version available.
Lots of good recommendations here. I use antiX on an ASUS EeePC X101CH and it works pretty well. I think the last release is a year old, though.
FreeBSD offers a 32 bit variant still via their i386 image.
Expect a small learning curve if you’ve never used UNIX, but most things are similar enough that you’ll be fine. If you’re ok picking up the FreeBSD handbook.
One of the OG eeepc is what got me into Linux. The distro it shipped with was ass (it was a Linux variant) so I went hopping and discovered Puppy Linux and a bunch of others. Ended up sticking with !# (crunchbang) which later renamed to BunsenLabs and I still run it on most of my devices to this day.
I ran Puppeee on my original which loaded completely to ram and only wrote to disk every 10 minutes or when prompted due to the early ssds very limited life span. It helped me get through folkhögskola and was small enough to let me easily work on the 1 hour 30 min bus ride to and from school. I think that model was called 4G and it was even tighter keyboard than my current due to åäö-keys being almost half width
Lets say I had 8 chromebooks 4gb ram idk CPU and their all working. What realistically could I do with them? Some lenovo some google.
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