Easy Distro for websurfing with old laptop. Possible?

[MaxTheFast]

I've got an old acer tm notebook with 32bit 1.6 ghz centrino cpu and 1.25gb ram (I guess DDR1 270mhz but I can be wrong). I still use it sometimes just as an "emergency" machine, eg. as an addition backup space for my storage, if I want to write something with old office within win xp environment and to run other old sw, but I can't use it to surf the web because I cannot install any AV else win xp would freeze. I could upgrade ram from 1.25gb to 2gb but I don't want to spend extra money for it and it would take me about 2h to change the 256mb inner ram (the outside ram has aldready been upgraded).

I've been using only this machine from its "creation" until about 1 year ago and I solved the websurfing problem using PaleMoon browser and some plugin like adblock to avoid loading the "heavy" content of today web pages. It was a situation full of limitations because I couldn't open more than 2-3 pages at the same time -and dangerous too due to no AV and the obsolete OS- but it was good enough for me.
Now I'd like to use sometimes this old acer to surf the web, so I'm thinking to get a linux OS to avoid AV and a web browser with right plugins able to load only the fundamental content of the web pages, I mean avoiding to load flash content and everything the would freeze the 1.25gb ram.

My level of knowledge of linux is "dummy" because I've only been using ubuntu 18.04 from 1 year so I'm used to work almost with GUI and not with the terminal. Therefore my goal is to get a low ram usage linux distro that is "easy" too :)

[Aragorn]

Post by MaxTheFast
I've got an old acer tm notebook with 32bit 1.6 ghz centrino cpu and
1.25gb ram (I guess DDR1 270mhz but I can be wrong). I still use it
sometimes just as an "emergency" machine, eg. as an addition backup
space for my storage, if I want to write something with old office
within win xp environment and to run other old sw, but I can't use it
to surf the web because I cannot install any AV else win xp would
freeze. I could upgrade ram from 1.25gb to 2gb but I don't want to
spend extra money for it and it would take me about 2h to change the
256mb inner ram (the outside ram has aldready been upgraded).
I've been using only this machine from its "creation" until about 1
year ago and I solved the websurfing problem using PaleMoon browser
and some plugin like adblock to avoid loading the "heavy" content of
today web pages. It was a situation full of limitations because I
couldn't open more than 2-3 pages at the same time -and dangerous too
due to no AV and the obsolete OS- but it was good enough for me. Now
I'd like to use sometimes this old acer to surf the web, so I'm
thinking to get a linux OS to avoid AV and a web browser with right
plugins able to load only the fundamental content of the web pages, I
mean avoiding to load flash content and everything the would freeze
the 1.25gb ram.
My level of knowledge of linux is "dummy" because I've only been
using ubuntu 18.04 from 1 year so I'm used to work almost with GUI
and not with the terminal. Therefore my goal is to get a low ram
usage linux distro that is "easy" too :)

1.25 GiB is really tight, man. You could always try Damn Small Linux
(DSL), but to the best of my knowledge, 2 GiB is about the lowest
requirement for a 32-bit distro these days, and you'll probably be
swapping like hell.

[Roger Blake]

Post by Aragorn
1.25 GiB is really tight, man. You could always try Damn Small Linux
(DSL), but to the best of my knowledge, 2 GiB is about the lowest
requirement for a 32-bit distro these days, and you'll probably be
swapping like hell.

Yes, things will go much better with 2GB. I'm running 32-bit Lubuntu
18.04 on an old Acer Centrino-based laptop upgraded to 2GB memory and a
small (30GB) SSD I had laying around, and it works fine. (Fortunately on
mine the memory upgrade was easy.)

[Carlos E.R.]

Multipost :-(
Added the other groups.

Post by Roger Blake

Post by Aragorn
1.25 GiB is really tight, man. You could always try Damn Small Linux
(DSL), but to the best of my knowledge, 2 GiB is about the lowest
requirement for a 32-bit distro these days, and you'll probably be
swapping like hell.

Yes, things will go much better with 2GB. I'm running 32-bit Lubuntu
18.04 on an old Acer Centrino-based laptop upgraded to 2GB memory and a
small (30GB) SSD I had laying around, and it works fine. (Fortunately on
mine the memory upgrade was easy.)

Got other replies on alt.linux and alt.os.linux

[David W. Hodgins]

Post by Roger Blake

Post by Aragorn
1.25 GiB is really tight, man. You could always try Damn Small Linux
(DSL), but to the best of my knowledge, 2 GiB is about the lowest
requirement for a 32-bit distro these days, and you'll probably be
swapping like hell.

Yes, things will go much better with 2GB. I'm running 32-bit Lubuntu
18.04 on an old Acer Centrino-based laptop upgraded to 2GB memory and a
small (30GB) SSD I had laying around, and it works fine. (Fortunately on
mine the memory upgrade was easy.)

The distro doesn't really matter. What matters most is which desktop environment
and what system services are enabled.

I'm running Mageia 7 x86_64 with the xfce de on a system with just under 1GB
of ram.

Part of the lshw output ...
description: Motherboard
product: Portable PC
vendor: TOSHIBA
*-firmware
description: BIOS
vendor: TOSHIBA
version: Version 3.70
date: 12/10/2007
size: 128KiB
capacity: 960KiB
capabilities: isa pci pcmcia pnp upgrade shadowing vesa cdboot bootselect edd int13floppytoshiba int13floppy720 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer acpi usb biosbootspecification netboot
*-cpu
description: CPU
product: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T5500 @ 1.66GHz

I've had to disable most services to make it even slightly usable, but I use it
to run konversation 24/7, so I can continue using irc when I'm rebooting other
systems I have. I've also been able to view some sites using lynx while still
running konversation.

With 2GB of ram I think it would be possible to use a lightweight gui web browser,
depending on what sites are being viewed. It wouldn't be enough for something
like watching a video, but should be enough for web searches and viewing mostly
text web sites. It would also require an adblocker

Blocking the following sites speeds up a lot of other sites by stopping
javascript routines used only for ads or tracking ...
# grep -e facebook -e google -e twitter adblock.conf|sort
zone "ads.ak.facebook.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "connect.facebook.net" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "facebook.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "googleadservices.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "google-analytics.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "googlesyndication.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "pagead2.googlesyndication.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "pagead.l.google.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "twitter.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "video-stats.video.google.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "wintricksbanner.googlepages.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "www.facebook.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "www-google-analytics.l.google.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };

Regards, Dave Hodgins

[TJ]

Post by David W. Hodgins

Post by Roger Blake

1.25 GiB is really tight, man.  You could always try Damn Small Linux
(DSL), but to the best of my knowledge, 2 GiB is about the lowest
requirement for a 32-bit distro these days, and you'll probably be
swapping like hell.

Yes, things will go much better with 2GB. I'm running 32-bit Lubuntu
18.04 on an old Acer Centrino-based laptop upgraded to 2GB memory and a
small (30GB) SSD I had laying around, and it works fine. (Fortunately on
mine the memory upgrade was easy.)

The distro doesn't really matter. What matters most is which desktop environment
and what system services are enabled.
I'm running Mageia 7 x86_64 with the xfce de on a system with just under 1GB
of ram.
Part of the lshw output ...
       description: Motherboard
       product: Portable PC
       vendor: TOSHIBA
     *-firmware
          description: BIOS
          vendor: TOSHIBA
          version: Version 3.70
          date: 12/10/2007
          size: 128KiB
          capacity: 960KiB
          capabilities: isa pci pcmcia pnp upgrade shadowing vesa
cdboot bootselect edd int13floppytoshiba int13floppy720 int5printscreen
int9keyboard int14serial int17printer acpi usb biosbootspecification
netboot
     *-cpu
          description: CPU
I've had to disable most services to make it even slightly usable, but I use it
to run konversation 24/7, so I can continue using irc when I'm rebooting other
systems I have. I've also been able to view some sites using lynx while still
running konversation.
With 2GB of ram I think it would be possible to use a lightweight gui web browser,
depending on what sites are being viewed. It wouldn't be enough for something
like watching a video, but should be enough for web searches and viewing mostly
text web sites. It would also require an adblocker
Blocking the following sites speeds up a lot of other sites by stopping
javascript routines used only for ads or tracking ...
# grep -e facebook -e google -e twitter adblock.conf|sort
zone "ads.ak.facebook.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "connect.facebook.net" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "facebook.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "googleadservices.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "google-analytics.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "googlesyndication.com" { type master; notify no; file
"db.adblock"; };
zone "pagead2.googlesyndication.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "pagead.l.google.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "twitter.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "video-stats.video.google.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "wintricksbanner.googlepages.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "www.facebook.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
zone "www-google-analytics.l.google.com" { type master; notify no; file "db.adblock"; };
Regards, Dave Hodgins

The OP didn't identify his video hardware, and that can make a
difference, too.

I have an old 32-bit Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop with a P4 and 2GB of RAM,
and like Dave I run Mageia 7 Xfce on it. It uses an old Radeon RV200
GPU, which works fine with Xfce but doesn't have the ability to use an
OpenGL high enough to run Mageia's Plasma 5. The same is true of older
nvidia GPUs.

BTW, Mageia does have a 32-bit Live XFCE iso available for download at
https://www.mageia.org/en/downloads/ In fact, it is the only 32-bit Live
media offered by Mageia.

I use my old Dell for 32-bit testing of updates for Mageia. I have used
it to do some minimal surfing with Firefox, but don't do so regularly
because I have other, much faster hardware readily available for that. I
HAVE been able to play Youtube videos on this hardware in Firefox with
no problem.

But the OP's hard drive concerns me, too. He mentioned on one of the
newsgroups that he plans to dual-boot with XP, leaving only 8GB of hard
drive space for Linux. That's REALLY tight if you are going to do
anything useful, if you ask me.

The IDE hard drive in my Dell was bad when I got it, and I bought a used
40GB replacement on eBay for less than $10US. It took maybe 15 minutes
to install. That gives me plenty of room, as I haven't dual-booted in
many years. If the OP doesn't have enough unused space on his XP install
to give more than 8GB to Linux, I'd recommend he visit eBay and look for
a bigger drive.

TJ

[MaxThe Fast]

Post by TJ
But the OP's hard drive concerns me, too

I need a linux distro that 1) uses very few ram, 2) supports 32bit and will support for very long time, 3) is good for noob, 4) requires no more than 8gb after hdd installation with a "proper" web browser, 5) [optional] comes with IT language version/package.
I got only 2 distros with those specs untils now: puppy xenial and knoppix lxde. Anyway please post your ideas and replies to alt.os.linux :)

[Charlie+]

On Mon, 11 Nov 2019 07:27:33 -0800 (PST), MaxThe Fast

Post by MaxThe Fast

Post by TJ
But the OP's hard drive concerns me, too

I need a linux distro that 1) uses very few ram, 2) supports 32bit and will support for very long time, 3) is good for noob, 4) requires no more than 8gb after hdd installation with a "proper" web browser, 5) [optional] comes with IT language version/package.
I got only 2 distros with those specs untils now: puppy xenial and knoppix lxde. Anyway please post your ideas and replies to alt.os.linux :)

Take a look at Q4OS (Debian based). C+

[David Brown]

Post by MaxThe Fast

Post by TJ
But the OP's hard drive concerns me, too

I need a linux distro that 1) uses very few ram, 2) supports 32bit and will support for very long time, 3) is good for noob, 4) requires no more than 8gb after hdd installation with a "proper" web browser, 5) [optional] comes with IT language version/package.
I got only 2 distros with those specs untils now: puppy xenial and knoppix lxde. Anyway please post your ideas and replies to alt.os.linux :)

It is not going to happen - not if by "proper" web browser you mean
current versions of Firefox, Chrome or Chromium. These are now 64-bit
only, or they are moving that way fast. And they require /lots/ of ram.

You'll be able to get a system that can handle simpler websites, but not
if you are expecting to use Facebook, Netflix, Google docs, MS Office
365, Google maps, online games, etc.

[Carlos E.R.]

Post by David Brown

Post by MaxThe Fast

Post by TJ
But the OP's hard drive concerns me, too

I need a linux distro that 1) uses very few ram, 2) supports 32bit and will support for very long time, 3) is good for noob, 4) requires no more than 8gb after hdd installation with a "proper" web browser, 5) [optional] comes with IT language version/package.
I got only 2 distros with those specs untils now: puppy xenial and knoppix lxde. Anyway please post your ideas and replies to alt.os.linux :)

It is not going to happen - not if by "proper" web browser you mean
current versions of Firefox, Chrome or Chromium. These are now 64-bit
only, or they are moving that way fast. And they require /lots/ of ram.
You'll be able to get a system that can handle simpler websites, but not
if you are expecting to use Facebook, Netflix, Google docs, MS Office
365, Google maps, online games, etc.

Hum! Perhaps requesting the mobile version of such pages: phones and
tablets do not have lots of cpu power or RAM.

[David Brown]

Post by Carlos E.R.

Post by David Brown

Post by MaxThe Fast

Post by TJ
But the OP's hard drive concerns me, too

I need a linux distro that 1) uses very few ram, 2) supports 32bit and will support for very long time, 3) is good for noob, 4) requires no more than 8gb after hdd installation with a "proper" web browser, 5) [optional] comes with IT language version/package.
I got only 2 distros with those specs untils now: puppy xenial and knoppix lxde. Anyway please post your ideas and replies to alt.os.linux :)

It is not going to happen - not if by "proper" web browser you mean
current versions of Firefox, Chrome or Chromium. These are now 64-bit
only, or they are moving that way fast. And they require /lots/ of ram.
You'll be able to get a system that can handle simpler websites, but not
if you are expecting to use Facebook, Netflix, Google docs, MS Office
365, Google maps, online games, etc.

Hum! Perhaps requesting the mobile version of such pages: phones and
tablets do not have lots of cpu power or RAM.

Any tablet or smartphone you buy now, baring the very low end devices,
will have more cpu power and ram than this guy's laptop. It's not hard
to find a new tablet with 2 GB ram for $100.

And look on e-bay - people can't give away laptops with the spec's he has.

(I'm not saying it is a good thing that a machine that is working
perfectly well is now worthless. But that is the reality.)

[MaxTheFast]

1st I get the right linux distro then the *proper* web browser :) Of course proper mean 32b compatible, with low ram usage and I'll use it only for "basic" surfing, I mean no youtube, no socials and so on.
I'd like to use this old machine instead of getting a 100$ device and I'm just wondering what's the *max* I can get from it, no miracles of course :)

I don't want to bore you anymore but the most interesting "place" where this topic is discussed is @ alt.os.linux, anyway we can go on here if some of you prefer :) My next step is going to run a pyppy linux live session and posting some commands related to acer's graphics as some of the other users required.

[Roger Blake]

Post by David Brown
(I'm not saying it is a good thing that a machine that is working
perfectly well is now worthless. But that is the reality.)

"Worthless" is in the eye of the beholder. I'm using an old 32-bit
Centrino laptop with 2GB of RAM and it works fine for anything I want to
do. I don't really have any interest in Facebook, Netflix, Google docs,
MS Office 365, Google maps, or online games. (For grins though I just
pulled up Google Maps in Firefox to see what would happen and and it
worked fine, brought up a map and directions in just a few seconds with
no apparent problems.)

[TJ]

Post by Roger Blake

Post by David Brown
(I'm not saying it is a good thing that a machine that is working
perfectly well is now worthless. But that is the reality.)

"Worthless" is in the eye of the beholder. I'm using an old 32-bit
Centrino laptop with 2GB of RAM and it works fine for anything I want to
do. I don't really have any interest in Facebook, Netflix, Google docs,
MS Office 365, Google maps, or online games. (For grins though I just
pulled up Google Maps in Firefox to see what would happen and and it
worked fine, brought up a map and directions in just a few seconds with
no apparent problems.)

Agreed, Roger. I just did a little checking with my old Dell Inspiron
5100, with a P4 and 2GB of RAM, using Mageia 7. I installed Adblocker
Ultimate, and logged onto Facebook. It came up fine, though it took a
very long time when compared to my newer i3 and i5 machines. Xfce's task
manager showed 44-46% RAM usage at that time, or less than 1GB, and of
course zero swap.

Moving over to Youtube, videos are definitely choppy, but I don't think
that's due to the low RAM, as the task manager showed even lower RAM
usage than Facebook, at 40%. Rather, I believe the choppiness is coming
from the limitations of the old Radeon 7500 (RV200) video card, using
the open source "radeon" driver.

Videos played offline in Xfce's parole media player are fine.

TJ

[Roger Blake]

Post by TJ
Agreed, Roger. I just did a little checking with my old Dell Inspiron
5100, with a P4 and 2GB of RAM, using Mageia 7. I installed Adblocker
Ultimate, and logged onto Facebook. It came up fine, though it took a
very long time when compared to my newer i3 and i5 machines. Xfce's task
manager showed 44-46% RAM usage at that time, or less than 1GB, and of
course zero swap.

I checked memory utilization while Firefox was running Google Maps
and it was about 570MB. Still very comfortable on a 2GB machine.
Bootup and launch time are pretty good due to the SSD. (Also LXDE is
pretty lightweight.)

Post by TJ
Moving over to Youtube, videos are definitely choppy, but I don't think
that's due to the low RAM, as the task manager showed even lower RAM
usage than Facebook, at 40%. Rather, I believe the choppiness is coming
from the limitations of the old Radeon 7500 (RV200) video card, using
the open source "radeon" driver.

Sounds likely - mine has whatever Intel video was current for Centrino
based systems at the time (around 2005) and SD youtube plays with no
problems, HD gets choppy. Though as mentioned VLC plays HD (720 due to
screen res) quite well locally.

It's a very functional 15-year-old machine with an up-to-date OS that
would have been trashed long ago if stuck with Windows. Seems all good to me.

[TJ]

Post by Roger Blake
It's a very functional 15-year-old machine with an up-to-date OS that
would have been trashed long ago if stuck with Windows. Seems all good to me.

Mine is older, from around 2002. I found it at a church sale, priced at
$10, completely dead, with no power supply to use to check it out. A
sensible person would have turned and walked away, but I bought it for
the challenge.

I bought a power supply first, pretty cheap on eBay. That allowed me to
boot into the BIOS and see that the display wasn't bad for something so
aged. That was about the only encouraging thing I saw. The battery was
bad, so bad it had to be pulled out. The keyboard had several
non-functioning keys, and the IDE hard drive and optical drive were both
toast.

Again, a sensible person would have cut his losses, but not me. I added
a wireless keyboard/mouse set to one usb port, and rigged the other up
to a powered usb hub with an external ssd and a Mageia Classic Installer
on a flash drive. I was able to boot up the installer, install Mageia on
the ssd, and use it. Clunky, but it worked.

So of course I couldn't stop there. Back to eBay, where I found a new
battery, a used keyboard, and a used IDE hard drive. I didn't bother
with the optical drive, as I rarely use them any more. The battery was
the most expensive, but I wanted to stay away from used on that one. The
used stuff was all very cheap, as these things go.

When finished, I too had a functional machine, with an up-to-date OS.
But with only 1GB of RAM, it wasn't as functional as it could be, so a
couple of months later I upgraded to 2GB.

By rights the machine I bought should have been sent to a recycler, but
now, not so much. And best of all, I had a great deal of fun bringing it
back to usable condition. Well worth it for that alone.

TJ

[Roger Blake]

Post by TJ
Mine is older, from around 2002. I found it at a church sale, priced at
$10, completely dead, with no power supply to use to check it out. A
sensible person would have turned and walked away, but I bought it for
the challenge.
...

Cool, I always love reviving old hardware. I also have an old Dell 8500
(an early wide-screen model) that hails from 2003, equipped with a
Pentium-4M and 1.25GB memory. It's running an old, no longer supported
version of Ubuntu. I think it should be able to run Lubuntu 18.04 like my
"newer" one, will have to try it. No SSD though, it has the old-style
parallel ATA drive interface. So it's slow, but looks like memory will
be adequate for Lubuntu and Firefox.

[MaxTheFast]

Mhhh... I don't think the last Lubuntu will run on your Dell due to its few ram. My acer has 1.25gb ram too and a pata hdd @5400rpm and I'm trying distros as puppy xenial and bionic and their live sessions run quite good. Just look at minimum lubuntu 18.04 requirements and you'll understand you're in my same situation :) If you want to bring your dell back to life you've to look at very low usage ram distros. My constrains are many more than that because I need a friendly distro (I'm very noob) and I need to be able to surf the web, that's the goal of this topic.

As said my goal is to use this acer to surf the web, of course a "basic" surfing, therefore is fundamental for me that my usb huawei dongle works and here my troubles begin. Consider I've ONLY this usb device to connect to internet, I mean no wireless, no router, etc, just the dongle. I want to use this acer as an "emergency" device so I want to get a distro that allows me to access the internet out-of-the-box. I know it's a pain to make usb internet dongles work so I've this idea: 1) trying distro lives until I get the one that let my huawei work out of the box or 2) pointing to a distro with a persistent installation and work on it to enable my huawei and get internet connection, then save the "job" and turn the modified distro into a new iso so I'll get an "emergency" distro with internet connection ready-to-use. What do you suggest to me? I've just tried puppy bionic but it can't see my huawei.
By the way, with puppy bionic running live and with nothing else than task manager opened my ram usage was 100/1233MB while after opening "light" (default web browser) it became 204/1233MB, @David W. Hodgins what about ram usage with your mageia 7 + xfce?

[TJ]

Often those published requirements are based on what is needed to
install the system, as opposed to actually running it once installed.
This depends on the design of the installer, which varies from distro to
distro. Also, for an experienced user like Roger, there are often ways
to reduce those requirements that would only cause trouble for an
inexperienced user.

Post by MaxTheFast
As said my goal is to use this acer to surf the web, of course a "basic" surfing, therefore is fundamental for me that my usb huawei dongle works and here my troubles begin. Consider I've ONLY this usb device to connect to internet, I mean no wireless, no router, etc, just the dongle. I want to use this acer as an "emergency" device so I want to get a distro that allows me to access the internet out-of-the-box. I know it's a pain to make usb internet dongles work so I've this idea: 1) trying distro lives until I get the one that let my huawei work out of the box or 2) pointing to a distro with a persistent installation and work on it to enable my huawei and get internet connection, then save the "job" and turn the modified distro into a new iso so I'll get an "emergency" distro with internet connection ready-to-use. What do you suggest to me? I've just tried puppy bionic but it can't see my huawei.

Ram usage of a live distro would be different from that of the same
distro if installed on a hard drive. It depends on the design of the
live version just how much of it is RAM-based vs. device-based. More on
the device reduces RAM requirements, but is MUCH slower than RAM-based.

Again, I don't believe lack of RAM is your biggest hurdle to achieve
your goal. I would put it at third or fourth, at best. IMO, the lack of
hard drive space, assuming you eventually want to install it on a hard
drive, is a much bigger problem.

Your other problem, of almost equal difficulty, is your requirement of a
newbie-friendly distro coupled with the need to use your dongle to
connect with the Internet. Wireless connectivity has always been a sore
spot with Linux, though things are better for wifi now than they used to
be. But cellular dongles, being less popular, haven't seen the same
attention. I have heard of experienced users getting them to work, but
only after jumping through hoops that would block the average newbie.

Often, the problem for Linux is lack of support from the hardware
manufacturer, not allowing the distribution of proprietary firmware that
may be needed for the device to function. Microsoft, being what it is,
doesn't have that problem.

TJ

[Jim Jackson]

Post by Roger Blake

Post by TJ
Mine is older, from around 2002. I found it at a church sale, priced at
$10, completely dead, with no power supply to use to check it out. A
sensible person would have turned and walked away, but I bought it for
the challenge.
...

Cool, I always love reviving old hardware. I also have an old Dell 8500
(an early wide-screen model) that hails from 2003, equipped with a
Pentium-4M and 1.25GB memory. It's running an old, no longer supported
version of Ubuntu. I think it should be able to run Lubuntu 18.04 like my
"newer" one, will have to try it. No SSD though, it has the old-style
parallel ATA drive interface. So it's slow, but looks like memory will
be adequate for Lubuntu and Firefox.

Ok I have a 2005 IBM thinkpad Laptop 0.75GB ram 40G laptop with Devuan
ASCII loaded on... after a boot and login with just 2 xterms running...

***@actinium:~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 703192 81664 419848 1296 201680 515452
Swap: 1951892 0 1951892

with libreoffice open with a 35 slide presentation loaded and firefox
running with just a single google page open ....

***@actinium:~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 703192 281232 59316 13096 362644 303868
Swap: 1951892 200 1951692

with as above but firefox having 2 sales sites, 2 forums, 1 weather, and 1
streetmap site open ...

***@actinium:~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 703192 468996 65036 22992 169160 107380
Swap: 1951892 37336 1914556

It's usable for simple work. I could really try and upgrade the ram I
think. I use it for lugging around when I do presentations, or for showing
pictures etc. Battery only lasts an hour though.

Jim

[Carlos E.R.]

Post by David W. Hodgins
With 2GB of ram I think it would be possible to use a lightweight
gui web browser, depending on what sites are being viewed. It
wouldn't be enough for something like watching a video, but should be
enough for web searches and viewing mostly text web sites. It would
also require an adblocker

Careful. With an addblocker it may result you need even more ram. There
is a technical explanation for it. And some pages may load slower
(because it breaks parallel loading, because elements have to be
analyzed before permitting to load the next element).

[Roger Blake]

Post by Carlos E.R.
Careful. With an addblocker it may result you need even more ram. There
is a technical explanation for it. And some pages may load slower
(because it breaks parallel loading, because elements have to be
analyzed before permitting to load the next element).

I have had no problems running Firefox with an adblocker and a few other
addons on my old 2GB laptop. SD videos play OK, but HD playback can get
choppy.

[Carlos E.R.]

Post by Roger Blake

Post by Carlos E.R.
Careful. With an addblocker it may result you need even more ram. There
is a technical explanation for it. And some pages may load slower
(because it breaks parallel loading, because elements have to be
analyzed before permitting to load the next element).

I have had no problems running Firefox with an adblocker and a few other
addons on my old 2GB laptop. SD videos play OK, but HD playback can get
choppy.

Video may play better outside of the browser, directly with a player
such as VLC.

[Roger Blake]

Post by Carlos E.R.
Video may play better outside of the browser, directly with a player
such as VLC.

Yes, I've found that is the case. Youtube playback can be choppy in HD
mode, but playing an mp4 file locally with VLC works well.

Overall considering how limited the hardware is by today's standards I'm
happy with the way Lubuntu is running on this old laptop. I certainly
won't be doing any video editing or conversion on it but for general
use it's fine.