Hello from an old Eee PC user

[Member anti-ewaste]

I’m downloading the 32 bit version now, for a 1000HD with only a gig of ram. I think I’m going to enjoy Anti-X as much as this hardware.

[Member rayluo]

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Welcome! Enjoy.

BTW, love the mindset described by your account name. Reusing older electronic devices can probably be as environment-friendly as (if not more environment-friendly than) using latest-and-greatest devices which might happen to have lower power-consumption.

Electronic scrap components, such as CPUs, contain potentially harmful materials such as lead, cadmium, beryllium, or brominated flame retardants. Recycling and disposal of e-waste may involve significant risk to health of workers and their communities.

Quoted from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste

[Member Xecure]

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It is never late for a good working computer. antiX is meant to give new life to abandoned computers.
We will help as best we know if you encounter any trouble.

Welcome to antiX!

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member anti-ewaste]

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Thank you both. I think another aspect of waste is waste of my time and attention. One way I’d describe myself is an enthusiast without the technical skills/knowledge, and in that regard an older machine helps me be more focused instead of being distracted by entertainment and worthless attention getting ploys that’s so prevalent online today. Sure I have other machines but I like this netbook well enough that I could use it for the essential basics when that’s the task at hand instead of slipping into the PC couch potato mode..

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by anti-ewaste.

[Member DaveW]

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I’m also an eeepc user (eee pc 900, 1 GB Ram, 16 GB SSD). I also have a Dell 620, which has a speedier CPU and 2 GB Ram. I use the Dell as primary home computer, and the Asus eeepc for travel and for Libre Office video presentations (when teaching the Bible at our church).

For a couple of years, I have been running Antix 17 (32 bit), installed on harddrive on both computers, with very acceptable performance. (As expected, the eeepc is noticeably slower than the Dell, when internet browsing with FireFox ESR. Otherwise, the eeepc seems pretty nimble for my normal uses.)

Several months ago, I attempted to install Antix 19 (32 bit) on both units. For most functions, the performance seemed pretty similar to Antix 17. However, after running into connectivity issues on both computers, I went back to Antix 17. I imagine those issues could have been resolved, but it looked like it would take more time than I was willing to invest, at that time.

At least, in my experience, the slightly older operating system (Antix 17) was a better fit for my older equipment. Almost everything worked upon installation, with very little need for reconfiguration of anything.

[Member seaken64]

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Welcome to antiX! A lot of us here use antiX to keep old equipment useful. I have some machines as old as a Pentium-2 with 256MB of RAM running antiX. But it will run great on your system with 1GB of RAM. And there are still quite a few programs available in the repositories to help with simple computing tasks that the modern world tends to ignore. Have fun!

Seaken64

[Member PPC]

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I own an old single core netbook with 1 gig of shared RAM – It takes about a minute to boot up. If I leave it suspended, with the Browser open, it can be used for Browsing basicly like a modern computer. It does not have an ssd disk, so booting or launching large applications, like modern web browsers or LibreOffice does take a little bit of time. Once open, the apps behave just it you would expect…
You can do office work, view videos, listen to music, play some casual games, surf the web (or do social media, if you are into that) or watch streaming videos on this very old machines, and the user experience is really, really good.
I keep thinking- currently, probably most modern desktops are used for office work, not gamming- so why do modern office computer need so much processing power/RAM/storage space?
I may be wrong but I think most hard-core gamming is probably done using consoles (PS/X-box) or mobile devices, so all those specs are not really needed for most uses (with the exception of playing modern games or for pariculares uses like doing heavy graphics/video editing).

P.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Modern office desktop systems are used for a wide range of activities.

Developers write code, but analysts write very large plans, reports, and often are juggling numerous concurrent tasks.

The size of some spreadsheets and documentation would surprise you, yet some people may be working on two of three of them, perhaps involved in five projects at some point during a typical week. This is probably getting worse, not better, as companies try to remain open with fewer and fewer people.

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Brian Masinick

[Member anti-ewaste]

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Re: Social media, nope – I’ve had to quit cold turkey. Even before Jaron Laniers book on the 10 arguments it became highly suspect to me after reading others like Douglas Rushkoff. In general I feel the old days of dial-up BBS chats and even networks like AOL and Quantum Link. was more pro social than what SM has become today. I bet some who are slightly older than myself never got pulled in and have spent more time honing their technical skills and knowledge but it seems I’m no longer the exception by far.

In terms of gaming machines, I’m seeing more custom home built gaming rigs sold online these days than I used to, and of course it’s all relative. I have a friend who did give up on PC gaming and owns all the new consoles, although they have someone in their circle in the industry who is very successful who will just buy them a console. To me I’m wondering “I wonder if you can put Linux on it.” 🙂

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by anti-ewaste.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Personally I have never been into gaming, whether on consoles, apps, desktops, or board games.

I’ve always been more of a bookworm, but when I was introduced to minicomputers in high school, that gave me a new way to read, write scripts to automate tasks, solve problems, research, and communicate. I now follow old computer technology and software with simple, low overhead, especially software similar to what many of us here use.

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Brian Masinick

[Member PPC]

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Brian Masinick wrote:

Modern office desktop systems are used for a wide range of activities.

Developers write code, but analysts write very large plans, reports, and often are juggling numerous concurrent tasks.

The size of some spreadsheets and documentation would surprise you, yet some people may be working on two of three of them, perhaps involved in five projects at some point during a typical week. This is probably getting worse, not better, as companies try to remain open with fewer and fewer people.

You are right, of course! A short time ago I edited a very large odt document, with nearly 600 pages- over a 1 meg in size, I had 2 versions of it open, one instance of firefox running and a small ods file open, all running without a glitch on my desktop (an i3 with 3 Gig of RAM, with no SSD)… I would not advise using a very underpowered device like my 1 gig of RAM netbook for that.
Still, using 3 Gig of RAM, in a time where 8 gig is the minimum to run other “modern” OS’s, it’s like trying to ride a dinosaur instead of a horse, for most computer users 🙂
In my humble opinion, the main problem is that the most used OS in the world is not easy on system resources at all, so modern laptops/desktops end up having increasingly higher specs than needed compared to machines running antiX or even MX (or other more “resource friendly” OS’s like Bodhi Linux- that’s a lighter “Ubuntu” than any other official flavour, with many screen animations, and lighter even than MX).
Even web browsing can be done using less resource hungry browsers, like Ungoogled Chromium (that, for me, lacks only the posssibility to watch DRM streaming video), or, if you are extremely minimalist, for “regular” web browsing, browsers like Badwolf…

P.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I remember working on some used, underpowered nineties vintage laptops running Windows 98, particularly during Year 2000 projects around 1997-1998. We may have had 32 MB or 64 MB, certainly not 8 GB or any amount of memory, CPU, or any other resource comparable to what we have now.

I actually had to either chop documents into smaller pieces and merge them together, or perform other acts of wizardry to get them to work.

Several years later, when running a mix of Windows XP, Linux and/or Solaris, I had much better success with such things. If I ever had difficulty editing something in a Windows environment, I’d copy or move it over a network to a Linux or a UNIX server, and by then most of them had some kind of word processing, such as Open Office, Libre Office, or possibly even calling up a Windows utility using a server’s resources – with a markedly better result.

I had a friend by that time who could have 20-30 tabs of various activities going, all at least being driven from a single Web browser instance, running local and remote pages.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

[Member seaken64]

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PPC wrote:

short time ago I edited a very large odt document, with nearly 600 pages- over a 1 meg in size, I had 2 versions of it open, one instance of firefox running and a small ods file open, all running without a glitch on my desktop (an i3 with 3 Gig of RAM, with no SSD)… I would not advise using a very underpowered device like my 1 gig of RAM netbook for that.

Software has changed quite a bit. Programmers no longer try to fit their programs into limited memory. It’s not necessary anymore because everyone has lots of memory and processing power. I edited long, hundreds of pages documents, books, on a computer with a 16-bit processor and 1MB of RAM using a program called Ventura Publisher. And it was not unusual in the printing business to use an old MAC512 running Aldus Pagemaker. Programmers had limited resources and figured out how to make it work.

I wonder how low in resources I can go and still edit those types of documents? Black and white, of course. And vector graphics and Postscript. That sounds like a fun experiment. I think I’ll start off with a Pentium 3 and 512MB of RAM. Scribus maybe?

Seaken64

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by seaken64.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I’ve heard of Scribus, but if I’ve ever even used it, the experience must’ve been brief; I don’t remember trying it out. I’ve used a variety of word processors, going back to Corel WordPerfect, early versions of Microsoft Word, Star Office, and Open Office. On Linux, beside StarOffice Writer and Open Office, I’ve used Abiword, and the tools I still occasionally use are LibreOffice, pdftotext (takes PDF text and converts it to .txt format) and a couple of PDF readers. Naturally I have used a great number of text editors, including all of the ones that old UNIX users have known since the early days. Once upon a time I even used TECO a few times! 🙂

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

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