Damn Small Linux revived my original Eee PC. Here’s how to use it on any old computer.

[Admin]

Elevate that Intel Celeron from 2007 from doorstop to functional PC with Damn Small Linux

Damn Small Linux revived my original Eee PC. Here’s how to use it on any old computer. : Read more

 

[mlstein]

I have a 701 and a 900, both with 2 Gigs RAM, and I find Puppy Linux the best, especially because it runs in RAM and avoids the slow MMC. I've made a custom ISO based on Bionic Pup (from 2018) with a browser that passes the security tests on most current websites and a good word processor (TextMaker 2018); it runs very fast and I can even do legal research and writing on it. You can download it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pOyozttRKjXAQQz-4_qyKIrLV7Q_YKSr/view?usp=drive_link

 

[bwets]

Damn, those are some thick bezels. I forgot that part about those eee pcs...

 

[mlstein]

Damn, those are some thick bezels. I forgot that part about those eee pcs...

Those aren't bezels, they're bezels with stereo speakers. In all the later versions the speakers were under the keyboard and the screen occupied most of the lid.

 

[AtrociKitty]

I still have my Eee PC 4G, it was a pretty neat device at the time. The cool thing to do when they were new was to install XP alongside a resolution scaler to make the 800x480 panel act as an 800x600 one. It's nice to see people still play with them, since it's pretty much a museum piece now.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

How does it compare against ChromeOS Flex?

 

[friedsonjm]

Sorry, I call BS. DSL in its current Alpha form can't be installed using Rufus to a USB stick! You have to follow this procedure, from a Linux box, no less: https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/forums/thread-37.html
It won't work with Rufus/Windows... and I know because I tried.

 

[kep55]

I have a Toshiba NB255 with 2GB RAM, powered by an Intel Atom N450. I currently have FossaPup64 Linux on it. How would DSL compare?

 

[slightnitpick]

On the Eee PC we found YouTube playback was not possible, because the CPU wasn’t strong enough to load all of the page elements.

Even if it had been able to load the page elements it wouldn't have been able to play the videos. My 1.8 Ghz desktop Duron processor and dedicated Radeon graphics card (somewhere in the 9500 to 9600 range as far as I recall) stopped being able to play Youtube videos without serious stuttering around 2012. The Celeron-M processor is only 8 months newer, and with half the clock speed when not underclocked.

Very neat project.

 

[hwertz]

You're pretty much spot on with the assessment of a Core 2 Duo being needed. My dad was running a Core 2 Quad as his daily driver until like 6 months ago and he really ran the piss out of it -- scanning, printing, watching videos and web browsing, loading up and reviewing 100-200 page documents, and weeky or more Zoom conferences. Running Zoom or playing youtube vids was taking 200% CPU time; and indeed, I ended up inheriting 2 Core 2 Duos and they would just keep up playing those vids for the most part. (Due to high risk of the 18 year old Dell eventually blowing caps or having some other catastrophic failure, we replaced it with a Coffee Lake system that gets about 20x the performance.)

I will note, this isn't a fault of code bloat or something. It's a matter of most videos (Youtube and otherwise) now being H.264 or H.265, where even 5-10 years ago they were MPEG-4. H.264 and H.265 are much more CPU-intensive to decode; and of course some of these older systems could use the GPU (or occasionally a dedicated decoder) to decode MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 but will have to use CPU decoding for H.264 and H.265 videos.

 

[curtk]

Thanks for this article. You inspired me to run Damn Small Linux on my old Asus Eee PC 1005PE. It works great!! The only trick I had to do was manually partition the drive to add the first partition as a 150MB /boot partition formatted as ext4. That way, grub was installed properly. If you have a large external SSD drive (mine is 1TB) and you just use the default partitioning scheme (the whole drive as a single large ext4 partition for / and a 1 or 2 GB swap partition), grub won't work.