I had installed Debian on an Acer Aspire One Laptop. It has a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU with just 1GB of RAM. I obviously can’t run it like a usual desktop anymore, it’s way too slow.
I tried it to connect it to my TV with HDMI to create some sort of “Smart TV” setup, but that didn’t work out because I can’t even play 1080p videos on VLC with it smoothly.
So… What now? Can I only use it for headless stuff like pihole, nextcloud, etc. now?
Is there any hope left for my unsuccessful “Smart TV” contraption?
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Print server, music box, copper scrap
Honestly, ewaste center.
Not much an atom with a gig of ram can do.
It works fine for me
@slazer2au @maliciousonion it can play music, do IRC, Jabber, vim (neovim even, if you’re lucky). there are even TUI rendering programs for Markdown and EPUB formats
You can get a RaspPi instead, and after a year or two you’ll have saved enough electricity to have paid for itself.
technically there is a lot it could do, but it would not be a number 1 pick for any of it (even if you only have a $100 budget) so i agree, get rid of it.
So i actually have the same laptop and had a ton of fun installing arch on it over the last christmas holidays. The experience made me understand a lot, triggered my new love for arch and was a fun project overall.
I ended up having a stable CLI setup with ytfzf and mpv to watch my favorite yt channels in glorious 720p, got bluetooth working for my headset and all. Very fun experience.
Edit: i am unsure on the 32bit part, I think mine is 64, could be another generation. In any case i also have 1gb of ram
You can try with libreelec https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/13250-testing-8-9-004-x86-acer-aspire-one/
That probably won’t work well
Probably or probably not. The only way to find out is to try. I’ve installed RetroPie on a number of old laptops; the oldest one being a 2002 Toshiba laptop. I got to play GBA games just fine with it.
It’ll run Johnny Castaway just fine.
I’m using my old netbook as Pi-hole and some home server stuff. Does its job.
You can get an old Raspberry Pi very cheap, i have a 2b but you can go even lower. It’s probably a better idea to spend a few bucks and install DietPi with Pihole on it. It uses only 5 watts, your laptop takes probably ten times more.
This is a very good point, and it’s one of the reasons I don’t use my old laptop as an always-on server.
While this is true for my another older netbook (40 W), my netbook’s power consumption for running Pi-hole is ~15 W. I think it’s acceptable for such operation. 5 W is tempting though.
You might be able to find a super lightweight desktop distro out there (I think Damn Small Linux can run on those specs?) or you could repurpose it as a basic server of some sort like you mentioned. Unless you wanted to invest in some cheap old ram to throw in there and maybe make it a bit faster, then I think those would be your best options.
Btw videos not working well because of absense of hardware decoding codecs, and it is make software decoding.
Since it’s an old acer netbook with an Intel atom cpu it is highly unlikely it has any hardware decoding built in.
It should as that’s a basic feature. It probably is just for mpeg2 at lower resolutions
I have a very similar spec Asus Eee PC that I use NetBSD with i3 on and it’s fine for like taking notes in vim or listening to music with strawberry. It can also run Haiku fine which I might switch to on it at some point because Haiku is fun. Anyway my best use idea is just use it to explore operating systems you’re curious about
You can install Haiku, the BeOS clone. That one runs well on less than 1 GB of RAM, and it had a new beta recently. Linux requires a minimum of 2 GB RAM these days to load 1 tab on a browser of a middle-complexity website, before it starts swapping. To really use Linux more comfortably, you’d need 4 GB, I’d say. And if you want to do 1080p video editing as well, then 8 GB. So, try Haiku.
Something that I considered doing with a similar laptop, was to use it as a low-end portable gaming system. I’d take a lightweight Linux distro, like the 32-bit version of Q4OS if it’s system requirements are lower than your current setup, and get it loaded with a bunch of games with low system requirements and retro emulators. Obviously, it wont be anywhere near as powerful as your main computer (if you have one) but because it’s portable, there could be some value in having a portable gaming pc (unless you have something like the Steam Deck).
Some more things I’ve used old netbooks for:
Portable pxe boot server
Audio source for mixing (think using a mixing board to do audio collage work with tape, record and digital sources)
Midi sequencer- the cheap usb to midi breakout cable works good here and you really don’t need much horsepower to sequence midi.
Tracker playback and editing
Display driver/art/digital photo collage/digital signage/whatever.
E: People will tell you that you’re better off with a sbc because it’ll save you money on power. Do your own research on this. A kill-a-watt is cheap and the power savings quickly gets murky.
In addition to the good suggestions for others in this thread (like setting it up as a portable gaming device or a server of sorts), it could also be set up as a low-distraction productivity machine. I don’t know how well something like LibreOffice would run on it, but I imagine you could probably use a simpler word processor or even a plain text editor.
Worst comes to worst, I wonder what hardware support for this thing is in something like ReactOS or FreeDOS.
Anything that requires GPU decoding will be choppy as it doesn’t support modern codex. However, assuming graphics acceleration working you should be able to browse the internet. Just make sure you have a SSD and some swap.
I tried setting up luks on one of these devices and it did work but the IO performance was slow due to the lack of CPU acceleration for modern cryptography. (That’s the theme of older devices)