Anyone know of anything fitting an Eeepc?
Puppy, Porteus, antiX, Q4OS, Slax run on 32-bit x86 and are supposed to be under the 256 MiB RAM mark.
Zorin Lite and Xubuntu ~512MiB.
Mint, LXDE and Bunsenlabs ~1GiB.YMMV
@ everyone recommending debian: it no longer supports 32 bit x86 machines: https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.html#reduced-support-for-i386
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Lets say I had 8 chromebooks 4gb ram idk CPU and their all working. What realistically could I do with them? Some lenovo some google.
… Run ChromeOS? :P which is basically android. Maybe run Linux if the bootloader is unlockable
One of the OG eeepc is what got me into Linux. The distro it shipped with was ass (it was a Linux variant) so I went hopping and discovered Puppy Linux and a bunch of others. Ended up sticking with !# (crunchbang) which later renamed to BunsenLabs and I still run it on most of my devices to this day.
Lots of good recommendations here. I use antiX on an ASUS EeePC X101CH and it works pretty well. I think the last release is a year old, though.
FreeBSD offers a 32 bit variant still via their i386 image.
Expect a small learning curve if you’ve never used UNIX, but most things are similar enough that you’ll be fine. If you’re ok picking up the FreeBSD handbook.
Antix,Debian ,arch i386 project
i wouldn’t recommend debian since they’ve dropped 32 bit support in trixie, their latest release. the previous release, bookworm, still supports 32 bits archs, but it eol’s less than a year from now
This is not true. (Edit: nevermind, I was wrong)
They’re dropping support for i586 and below. 32-bit systems with i686+ processors will still run fine.
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.html#reduced-support-for-i386
From trixie, i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems
[…]
Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware.
Not all 32-bit systems are i386. For example, my 32-bit Debian thinkpad runs Trixie just fine. Because it’s i686 which is still supported.
So again, Debian 13 isn’t dropping 32-bit support. Just i586 support and below.
Not all 32-bit systems are i386
but the debian i386 architecture means all 32 bit x86 processors. there’s no “i686” build of debian
there are no i586 or i686 kernel or iso available, you can look for them. i386 packages only exist for compatibility reasons, so you can run 32 bit applications on amd64 machines. please read the release notes
but the debian i386 architecture means all 32 bit x86 processors.
That was very confusing to me. I’m sure they have their reasons, but calling it something like x86 would’ve been more clear to me.
The original x86 platform. Now requires “686” class CPU. Unsupported in trixie and newer except in chroots on amd64 hosts.
I’m sure they have their reasons
maybe compatibility reasons. i guess they used to support i386 back in the day and didn’t want to break the couple of systems that were installed on bo and have been upgrading ever since
I was wrong. Thank you. And I don’t have Trixie on the 32-bit Thinkpad, it was my other laptop.
slackware, netbsd, openbsd
edit: i forgot tinycore, you gotta try that too
+1 for NetBSD it’s such a great OS for ressource limited platforms. Rough edges by today standards but it worth a try on OP’s PC.
Edit : would you please post something like neofetch screenshot when your eeepc is up and running ? :)
This thread is making me nostalgic for Ubuntu Netbook Remix
Since I doubt the latest and greatest drivers interest you, I suggest debian. Might as well profit from extreme stability and reliability
Debian has dropped support for 32 bit in Debian 13.
Use debian 12 then, again, its not like you need the latest and gratest
Debian Security Support ends in 9 months and the LTS’s supported platforms haven’t been announced. It could very well be that in 9 months the i386 version of Debian 12 stops getting security updates. https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
My eepc is also 32 bit with 2gb of RAM. I did Debian 12 with LXDE from the net installer and it works really well.
OpenSUSE has a 32-bit build.
Running modern web browsers is no fun.
I assume there will be a not too distant date in the future when Firefox ESR drops 32bit altogether…
Debian. Just Debian. No drama.
Not Debian 13. https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.html#reduced-support-for-i386
Also note that the Debian team uses i386 to mean what we think of by 32 bit x86, not just CPUs from the very old i386 generation. https://wiki.debian.org/i386
I’ve had good luck with Antix on very old machines.
