Anyone know of anything fitting an Eeepc?
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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
I was wrong. Thank you. And I don’t have Trixie on the 32-bit Thinkpad, it was my other laptop.
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!
@ 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
Since I doubt the latest and greatest drivers interest you, I suggest debian. Might as well profit from extreme stability and reliability
This thread is making me nostalgic for Ubuntu Netbook Remix
My eepc is also 32 bit with 2gb of RAM. I did Debian 12 with LXDE from the net installer and it works really well.
OpenSUSE has a 32-bit build.
Running modern web browsers is no fun.
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I’ve had good luck with Antix on very old machines.
Debian. Just Debian. No drama.
antiX
That said this machine will not be able to cope with the www of 2025.
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.
MX runs fine, but applications such as browsers are very slow because of the old CPU 😐
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.
Something with LXDE or XFCE Desktop Environment, that is usually the DE for low-spec distros.
