Updated: September 23, 2024
Long long ago, in a galaxy far ... Nah. Back in 2010, I got myself a netbook. It was an Asus eeePC thing, small, robust, lovely, and reasonably priced. Fast forward a good decade, I've used it everywhere. Inside and outside, in rough outdoor conditions, and it's survived a dozen business trips with pride. Practical use, too, including mail, browsing, music, videos, writing books, everything you can imagine.
Over the years, though, its tiny, super-ancient processor started lagging behind the (mostly unnecessary) growth in computing demands for ordinary things. My last endeavor with this box was around 2019. I installed MX Linux 18 on it, and this fine, frugal distro gave it a fresh breath of life and relevance. I wasn't sure how much longer the system would receive updates, and what to do once that episode ended. Well, as it turns out, just when I thought it might be time to retire the eeePC, it snapped its red clamshell cover and shouted: I ain't dead yet. Well, let's talk about it, shall we?
Boot, update, or at least, try to
Not having powered it for about a year or so, the CMOS battery ran out. I had to "reconfigure" the BIOS, but then, MX Linux booted fine. Once logged in, I tried to update the system, but the package manager complained that the repos have all been retired:
E: The repository 'http://security.debian.org stretch/updates Release' does no
longer have a Release file.
N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by
default.
I changed the repos to archive.debian.org, and this helped some. My system told me it had updates, and I let the system ran. It took about an hour for it to download and install all of the patches. But this didn't help much, as the archives were quite outdated. Firefox stood at version 66. If I wanted to do anything meaningful, I had to upgrade the box.
The question is, is that even possible?
Yes, it is!
I went to the MX Linux website, and they STILL offer 32-bit builds of their distro. Yes, the last-year version, MX Linux MX-23.3 Libretto is available, with a PAE 6.1 kernel from Debian stable. Sounds cool. I downloaded the distro, wrote the image to a USB drive, and tried to install.
The process worked fine. It took about two minutes for the distro to load, and the rendering of the wallpaper was a bit slow. However, I was logged into the live session, and I could start the installation. I decided to preserve my /home, which has all of the customization and changes from the very beginning.
The entire installation process, on a lowly 2009-era Atom took 15 minutes. Then, I rebooted, and let the fun begin. The distro took about two minutes to launch into a working session. This is even better than what I had on my rather beefy 2014-era IdeaPad laptop (with Kubuntu) before adding an SSD into the equation. If you think about it, there's a lot of cruft in the software space, and really nt reason for distro images to be that massive (or designed in a rather non-frugal way). Yes, technology, hardware, progress, but just because you have the means, does not mean using them ignorantly (the whole could should Jeff Goldblum quote from Jurassic Park). As an analogy, it would be like buying a car with a large luggage space and then placing 500 kg (177 beavers in Imperial units) of bricks in there, just because you have the (available) space.
Does it work? Yes it, does!
Like in my previous two upgrades, the looks were all messed up. It took me a good half hour to polish everything, sort out the panels, top and side - with just 600 px of vertical space, a side panel makes a lot of sense, more than my previous configuration, anyway. MX Linux also uses the Papirus icons, which is quite neat.
Pretty solid, I have to say. A fully up-to date system, with kernel 6.1, supported until June 2028! On top of that, you get the full range of modern software, which you can use. How well and how fast, well, that's a separate topic, but you can.
I tried video, and up to 480p, the playback is smooth. Above that, it's a bit meh. Music worked just
fine, and so did Samba connectivity. I even installed TrueCrypt 7.1, and that, too, worked without
problems, and I was able to open a couple of old archives stored on the netbook's disk. On the hardware
side,
fan control works out of the box, smoothly,
and I didn't need to do any manual changes. All of the Fn keys worked without any problems. Superb.
The good ole battery worked fine, too. With normal usage (and Wi-Fi on), you can expect 4-5 hours. This is excellent, considering the age of this machine, plus the fact this is still the same old, original battery unit. Sure, you can no longer get the 2010-era usage times (maybe with the antennas turned off), but this is fantastic, nonetheless.
Everything is perfect then?
Of course not. This is still an old, old machine. You cannot expect any miracles. Things happen very slowly. Firefox, for instance, no longer has the compact density mode, so it looks too chunky on the old eeePC. Another "modern" software annoyance, if you will. As you can see in the screenshot above, Firefox's border does not align with the rest of the system, and takes waaaay too much vertical space, for no good reason. And that's with the title bar disabled - which also means I don't get proper active window color integration.
The CMOS battery is truly dead. Every boot (after powering off and not being connected to the charger), it's the F1/F2 key question. The laptop works fine. The cover used to be quite sticky, and it would collect a lot of dust and dirt. Last year, though, I spent a couple of hours cleaning and buffing it, and I removed the sticky layer completely. Now, it's smooth and elegant.
The cover, after removing the sticky layer (using simple wipes). The logo is scuffed, but this is after nigh fifteen years of traveling, airport checks, beach and field use, anything you can image.
Conclusion
The sturdy lil' Asus eeePC is one of my best purchases ever. The netbook still feels great in your hands, the keyboard is amazing. The old battery has barely deteriorated. Despite its humble hardware capabilities to begin with, it still manages to soldier on almost fifteen years later. That's quite insane. This is roughly the time when the hardware advancement began to slow down, as only within a couple of years, you could have systems that still cope with today's software challenges (except intentional bloat, of course).
The true (second) hero of this story is the MX Linux distro. It advertises itself as a midweight desktop operating system, so I wonder what constitutes as "light"? But it provided everything. 32-bit modern kernel, a rich and varied range of software (and here the mix of frugal and weight comes in perfectly balanced), decent looks, tons of friendly utilities for system management, all of it. Very cool. In fact, I'm gonna review this distro nice and proper very soon, that's how impressed I am. Well, I won't be breaking any speed records with the netbook, but as an eccentric choice for lightweight browsing and mail, plus some music and maybe some writing in a recent edition of LibreOffice, the eeePC can deliver. It's still alive. Amazing.
Cheers.