Linux for an Old Laptop

BionicPup 32 surprises me by its lightness, especially that light browser!

Bionic Pup looks like the right choice for my Mini PC, last year it ran fine using win 10 online, this year it is struggling.

soon I'll try Lubuntu and Antix on a 2GB ram netbook.. Zorin OS lite was slow, boring looking, and too restrictive for me, also, "pay for more".. those developers desperate for money lol, never again with Zorin

Please test PeppermintOS.

Can we install bionicpup on harddrive? I dont want run this from usb ....

This video is still quite informative. I've been on a kick lately of getting old Eee PCs and bringing them back to life. They were so small, but chonky. I love the form factor. You can add the 32 bit Debian 12 to the list. Debian's installer is much easier to use, now, and getting an XFCE install going takes no time at all.

Hi Chris, I have an old HP Intel Chromebook and I was sure you did a video on how to install Linux MInt on one. But I can't find it. Please can you point me in the right direction. Many thanks.

I have a number of these Atom netbooks. The distros that have worked well are BunsenLabs 32 bit and Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 5 32 bit.

I feel like this is the absolute minimum computing experience. It’s like - philosophically what is the reason to have a laptop when your modern smart phone does pretty much everything. The ONLY thing I found a phone won’t do for me is a spreadsheet app.

On that old laptop what did you end up using it for? Would it have been possible to swap out the eMMC storage for a higher capacity eMMC module? Even if it were soldered to the motherboard could you de-solder it to replace it with a faster and higher capacity module?

No Ubuntu operating system boots for me

What hdmi recorder do you use?

it is amazing ti see that everything worked fine but the internet! I have the same issue with my old macbook from 2008 with Lubuntu 22.04 on it. Everything fine but internet is a pain in the butt.

BunsenLabs OS has been my goto for 32bit systems. It runs flawlessly on my acer1 Intel Atom N270 w/ 2g RAM.

Great video thanks!

I love the cut of your jib man. I'm subscribed and I watch everything from your collection! Your just very informative and I love the accent!

But I have a question for you. I know Linux runs very well on older systems. I have linux on all my computers because...well...their old! But if you put say, Linux Mint on a system like you have won't timeshift eat up the drive space over a period of time? I've run into space issues on a system with a 120gb ssd. When checked in disk usage analyzer there is only several gigs left on the drive after a period of time. The only way I figure I can correct this and claim back some disk space is to delete some timeshift recordings and lower the frequency of recordings. Is there any other way to achieve this without deleting timeshift recordings?

I used to love my late aughties Eee

Fantastic size and form factor

Terrible for computing though 😅

It’s painful to see office starting in a wink of an eye while it takes multiple seconds to start the recent MS Office on a modern Mac.

puppy linux is the hero old computers need. Love to see it.

32 bit ubuntu based systems arent supported anymore

Hello, first off, thank you for the very nice presxentation, I appreciate it, now second, I have never used Linux in my life and recently I've got my hands on a Acer Aspire one laptop which I like I lot due to it's size and design, problem is, just like your EePc, it has very low specs , same processor as yours and 1.5GB of RAM , so what you presented here would be quite suitable, however, given that I'm completly new to Linux, biggest question is, can you install programs on it?

today i am upgrading my three old lenovo T410's to mint 21.1. I love mint on my laptops because they run like brand-new computer fast and without problems.
with windows i would have to trouble shoot them every 3 months because they would get so slow and drop on me

Recently I reanimated my Medion Akoya E1210 with slacko puppy 7. I only swapped the ram for a 2gb one. Apart from Antix it is probably the most lightweitht distros available now with idle consumption of ~60 mb of ram. But it's not perfect. There is a lot of configuration to be done in system files to get it to work like a reasonable modern os which may put off of it a linux new comer. Its repos are indeed frugal with obsolete packages, the package manager is not user friendly and it does not resolve dependencies well which forces you to search for missing packages. The os also misses some rudimentary functionalities, like moving to trash/recovering instead of deleting. Opening icons on the desktop works only by mouse double click. It has problems with recognizing function keys and it does not support the built in camera although the kernel detects it properly. But once you get it configured, it can serve as backup machine for some basic tasks.

I having a hard time with my XP desktop. I have an old HP pavilion XT963 Windows XP PC Desktop. I am trying to turn it into a Linux, but the problem is some of the f keys for the bios are missing, I can't use the F12, and it will not boot from both a burned disk and USB for some unknown reason it won't respond. Can anyone help me?

How do I set the contrast of the Windows 11 Ryzen 35300u as just the same way as my 2015 Hp pavilion ? There's only a way to set the brightness and no possibility to increase the contrast.
The monitor image looks just like I'm looking through a condensed window , instead of a full contrast normal monitor screen.
Thanks in advance.

I absolutely love the 80s vibe of this channel. Reminds me of The Computer Programme.

Very usefull video...indeed !

BionicPup and ZorinOS Lite don`t run on my old xp laptop, because they need PAE-support. Antix 22 base does the job and for videos i use Puppy tahr 6.0.5 that includes VLC.

I took a Dell mini12 upped the ram to 2GB for $10 and dropped in a 120GB SSD . The bionic pup 32 works great except I hate the network utilities which make switching between hard wire and wifi messy and confusing . Thanks for the confirmation I did the right thing.

i aske about q4os and puppy linux for old laptop

BionicPup? That's, literally, PuppyLinux.
Zorin Lite not so lite, is it?

Less than a month to go before Ubuntu drop support for 32 bit distros! I think now it would be fitting for you to make a farewell video to this era of computing with another 32 bit Linux distro video before it becomes impossible to do so!

<3

👍

I' m using An old laptop with a single core procesador An 1 GB RAM, 40 GB HDD IDE and working with Zorin 12.4 Lite based on Ubuntu 16.04 at first time and recently It was upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04.- LTS will finish in less two months.- Do you know if there is a Linux Distro non based on Ubuntu which is LTS what is compatible with my laptop?

I like bionic pup.

thanks

WARNING This is BS........laptops x 5 distros NON WORKED

I have tried various distros on my EEE901: Easy Peasy; Lubuntu; Xubuntu; Knoppix; WinXP; Win 7 Lite; Bionic Pup; Puppy Linux with LXLE; Tahr Pup; Bunsen Labs; Slitaz, etc. I found Lubuntu to be the most straightforward option. Bionic Pup also very good, particularly because the Puppy Linux community is so helpful in their forum. Knoppix was great as well and even has tools for 3d design and 3d printing (blender, Slic3r, OpenSCAD).

I didn't realize this video was that old, April 2023 is in two months :(

Lubuntu with LXDE was the best OS ever IMO. Fast, efficient, infinitely configurable, and easy to learn for older people.

Definitely try Linux Lite next time specially the 3.8 32-bit version in case the pc is really low spec and old

Puppy linux is definately worthy of anyone's old laptop and saved 3 of mine from the disposal unit...so many laptops and computer's are thrown for little or non issues.

At the moment I have two old netbooks with Intel atom Inside that both are currently running windows ten .. I suppose you can imagine the nightmare it is to use them so I would like to find out what you think would be the ideal software to install in order to make them somewhat useful (for instance office work)

Shame so many distros are dropped 32-bit support :-/

As always, an excellent video.

Only problem I've been having with puppy Linux on my laptops is that all newer ones just won't recognize my function keys . Also it will not detect that the lid is closed . Otherwise when I was a kid and my parents had no money for new hard drive I used lucid puppy 5.2 or something from 2 gigs of usb drive and even managed to play half life with wine

Does anyone knows how to fix the nvidia card? I am trying to revive an old laptop for an friend of mine (32-bit HP Pavilion Dv6000 with Nvidia card). The problem is that everytime I boot from the USB (Linux Mint 32-bit) it does make the screen in tiles and it becomes incompreensible to proceed with the instalation. I read some people facing the same issue but with little help regarding this.
Thank you for your Channel, I do enjoy watching your videos and learnt a lot!