This laptop was originally sold with Windows 7 32-bit edition installed. Even back then it was really unresponsive and clunky. After several years of it lying around and being useless, I decided to do a really lightweight debian install on it.
And guess what? It can do so much more than sit idly in some landfill.
Now I can use it to write my study notes in neovim (gives me a good excuse to learn vim, and I’m learning slowly), listen to music with gst123, learn c and c++, torrent large files with transmission-cli and qbittorrent, and the list goes on…
I mostly just use tty. I hit “startx i3” if I absolutely need a GUI, but for everything else, tty. I use links2 for Wikipedia, online resources and browsing memes which is already a big chunk of my internet usage. I was really giddy when I saw Tor browser had a 32-bit version, it runs surprisingly well even with less than 1 gigabyte of memory (unless I visit some really bloated sites)
I can’t play videos though, that’s the one major thing it can’t do. The integrated GPU is unsupported so playing videos or 3d-gaming is out of the question.
BTW is there a lemmy instance/frontend I can use via CLI or links2?
Ew, R*ddit
Forgive me father, for I have sinned 🛐
It’s even funnier because the title uses the word “useful” and then shows a screenshot including reddit – lol
Gee, I’m sorry alright? Just wanted to show off Tor browser, old.reddit.com was the first thing that came to mind that I’d use with Tor 😅
No worries, really, just made me smirk on seeing lol
Reddit spotted. 2.5/10 setup.
The old.lemmy.world frontend (also old… on other instances) works in links2.
There’s currently no other way to browse Lemmy in a text browser on a TTY that actually works, I’ve tried them all recently (including browsh, carbonyl, neonmodem).With the amount of Linux nerds on Lemmy, I’m shocked there’s an a TUI client for it.
Maybe I’ll have to make one someday.
There is one (Neonmodem), and it seems to work for some, but it never showed any posts when I tried it, and I tried it on several different distros, client versions, Lemmy accounts and home instances.
I’m still surprised there are 32 bit apps out there that are supported still. It’s good to know there are people who are working to prevent e-waste.
Also that links2 thing is quite interesting.
For your last question, there’s the Lemmy terminal viewer — I think it’s unmaintained, but it’s a start?
Nothing screams “Workstation” louder than Reddit Mobile.
Hmm, wonder if I should attempt to do the same for my old Intel Laptop; currently not using because the Disk Read / Write seems pretty slow (HDD, constantly at 100%)
well, you heard the website 😂 now install waydroid and their mobile app
I really gotta install something with dwm on my dad’s old nettop. It’s just sitting in a box for years. Gotta figure out how to work around a faulty screen tho. It’s damage by moisture on the edges, so I can’t see shit during installation
sudo apt-get install intel-media-va-driver-non-freeVideo will still be clunky but less clunky.
The atom cpu in this has a powervr sgx545 gpu which is barely supported by anything. Ubuntu 12.04 has some support but it’s only 2d acceleration.
Try icewm
No, I prefer i3
It does support 64-bit though?
Yeah, the processor does. The laptop as a whole doesn’t.
I did some searching and this may be because Asus has disabled the functionality in the BIOS, or much of the peripherals don’t support 32-bit. I have no idea what it is tbh, and I don’t really care at this point.
