Reviving a netbook (Part IV – The Retro Route)

April 19, 2024

After installing antiX and encountering the same thermal issues I witnessed on both Devuan and Salix, alongside a desktop experience much worse than on both, there wasn't a point in testing the remaining distributions targeting old 32-bit machines. It became apparent that all distributions still under active development either long abandoned optimizations for netbooks or never offered them in the first place. What made this realization particularly frustrating were quite recent forum posts on Reddit and other sites still recommending distributions such as Lubuntu, which are WAY too heavy on such devices not in terms of RAM or the type of storage device (“install a SDD” is almost always being recommend by those people for some reason) but of CPU demands. All tested distributions, in fact, performed smoothly, however my netbook eventually started to smell like melting chips and, because sensor readings turned out to be largely useless, I had to use my (even less reliable) hands to estimate this machine's CPU temperature, which were MUCH higher than all of my notebooks constantly reporting temperatures above 48°C.

Since this model also came with Windows XP installed at some point (though not on the device I bought), I joked to myself about giving in entirely and just install Windows XP. But alas, XP always gave me a sense of unease even when I was allowed to use it as a kid. So I began to dig and quickly came across a list on Wikipedia highlighting my growing suspicion of the Linux ecosystem of 2009 largely missing the netbook boom. Few distributions targeted all netbook brands and there were nearly a handful of distributions targeted the Asus Eee series in particular. The only “netbook editions” of operating systems that looked reasonable for that time are CrunchBang and Ubuntu Netbook Edition, with the latter seemingly being the only one providing a live environment for testing purposes.

Despite this list being horribly outdated, I was curious about Manjaro's long-abandoned netbook edition, however Manjaro does not maintain an archive for old releases. Coming across a rare review from 2014, I guess no one's missing out on anything because the only relevant difference Manjaro NE provided was a customized kernel, whereas the graphical environment provided MDM, Linux Mint's Display Manager which even back then already was too heavy for such devices, and Openbox – once again another random choice of software that makes no sense when remembering which devices it was supposed to target.

While Ubuntu offers a comprehensive archive for all of its version and thus allowed me to grab a copy of its “alternative” ISO targeting netbooks, I was unsure if there's still an old copy of CrunchBang due to its distribution model up until its discontinuation; CB was exclusively distributed via Torrent. Philip Newborough, the developer of CB, did not submit the final version of his distribution to the Internet Archive, in fact only two versions for AMD64 machines and one for the i386 architecture ever were donated, which is... rather paradoxical, considering the occasional waves of nostalgia from former CB users still popping up in comment sections and forum threads from time to time (and, from the perspective of a long-time Torrent user, quite asshole-ish because this kind of supports Red Hat's recent change to no longer make their source code accessible to non-customers; most FOSS users indeed are leechers).

Live Environments

The first challenge I was expecting to arise did not occur, in fact Ventoy was able to boot both images. Because only Ubuntu offers more than one version, I chose Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” and CrunchBang 10. Because I first took a proper run with Linux back in 2020, where I settled with Ubunto 20.04 “Focal Fossa” for a few months on my Asus laptop until I switched to Archcraft on all of my 64-bit devices, it was strange for me to witness this old version of Ubuntu and its “Unity” desktop environment demanding exactly 256 MB of RAM. CPU spikes occurred when opening installed applications, however this kind of behavior is what I expect during Live-ISO tests. While it lacked htop, it did include Vim and the system notified me that non-free drivers such as b43 are locally available. This driver cannot be installed during a dry run because it requires a restart. Overall responsiveness of graphical tools was rather clunky.

CrunchBang instantly reminded me of its spiritual successors, of which Archcraft is a rare Arch-based example. Its Conky, unlike BunsenLabs and CB++, reported only actively-used RAM. All of its successors tend to report RAM with active and cached combined, which tends to be very misleading and initially resulted in my surprise that CB's active RAM usage varied between 98 and 108 MB – still a lot for its era but it should be noted that CB did not explicitly target netbooks back in the days. The latter appears to explain why most of its graphical tools tend to take a few seconds to load and navigation to lag a little. As opposed to Ubuntu NE, CB did not ship with Vim but the b43 driver was loaded automatically.

After using both live environments for a few minutes, my netbook got just a little less warm than it did when it ran the latest Live-ISO of BunsenLabs. By then I began to question the validity of past reviewers in the same vein I question today's distribution reviewers focusing solely on eye-candy and combined RAM stats due to the ridiculous belief that RAM is more important than the CPU (remind me to dedicate a separate post on this topic in the future).

But now I was faced with the difficult choice of selecting one OS to install first. Both images lacked GDebi to install DEB packages manually, so it didn't matter for which one I'd have to either “git clone”, “wget” or “curl” my way through things just to get my default system monitor ready. My expectations for Ubuntu were higher due to specifically targeting netbooks, whereas CB got the closest to my daily driver's desktop experience. I threw a coin and Ubuntu won.

Ubuntu Netbook Edition

Ubuntu Network Edition was a remix of Ubuntu specifically targeting netbooks. The last standalone version of it was released alongside 10.10 and was merged with the main branch the following release. As the wiki UbuntuUsers archived its Netbook Edition article in 2012, it is fair to assume that Canonical stopped providing netbook optimizations around the same time.

Installation

Like its latest version, “Maverick Meerkat” shipped with the Ubiquity Installer. After partitioning and setting my language, timezone and user, the installation took roughly ten minutes to complete. Although slower than antiX, which took six minutes, UNE still was seven to ten minutes faster than Salix and Devuan, respectively.

First Impressions

Right after boot, which took 40 seconds but later would decrease to 20, a window popped up stating that support for my language (German) was incomplete, recommending me to download additional language packages. While the b43 driver worked out of the box, it's fairly useless because all repositories went defunct with Maverick Meerkat's EOL back in 2012. This also meant that I'm stuck with what's installed due to this version not supporting the latest SSL certificates. And despite having opted to install proprietary drivers and media codecs, the latter were not installed at all (which is only tolerable for my desired use case).

Fortunately, it came with Vim pre-installed, though it took me a while to find it. It cannot be run by entering “Vim”, instead it's called by its alias “vi”, which is unfortunate when you want to run Vim's predecessor. Unfortunately, I had to rely on top, instead of my standard tool htop, to keep track of resources and processes.

Only running its graphical text editor, GNOME File Manager and GNOME Terminal, UBE claimed 226 MB of active RAM on average. The CPU, while still getting noticeably warm and experiencing spikes, seldom exceeded 50% and mostly varied between 20% under moderate load and 2% when idling. As impressive as those stats may be, navigating the desktop was just as slow and clunky as on its live environment. Typing this on UBE's graphical text editor, in contrast, was very smooth. The battery did not seem to benefit much, as it lost power nearly just as fast as during previous tests and when running Windows 7 Starter.

The odd thing about UBE and perhaps most distributions from that time had to be its proper lack of support for Markdown files. All of my MD files were listed as a type of ROM file with a generic icon. Nevertheless, I was able to access and edit them via both text editors and only had to live without syntax highlighting (which obviously changed when I edited this portion of the review on my Arch machines).

The Outdoor Experience

Roughly a week with mixed weather conditions and the resulting abuse of the pre-installed Solitaire later, it was time to go outside. Because UBE also includes a separate application for quick notes, I was able to easily switch between that and working on my reports. Outdoor temperatures were lower than during previous tests and the wind picked up during the “simulation”, so I was unable to estimate how this setup would perform during regular field trips.

Arguably the biggest annoyance was the lack of multi-touch gestures that cannot be configured at all. When scrolling through my notes, I had to either rely on keys or my touchpad's “mouse” buttons. More often than not, Unity did not react when clicking on an application, usually requiring two or more clicks to run a program. The battery applet behaved as random as my iPod touch 3G's battery indicator (which, I presume, was just normal back then but still is funny AND off-putting at hindsight). UBE also automatically decreased the screen brightness to the lowest possible value after a few seconds, however it did not increase back to the value prior to it, forcing me to constantly increase it manually afterwards and remove accidentally-typed “±”'s in the process.

Despite this, I was able to take some quick notes and work on this section of this very post with a little less worry about this netbook's CPU temperatures. They did increase noticeably after running Tomboy Notes for a few minutes but the machine cooled down after either letting it idle or suspend it for a nearly equal amount of time. Strangely, after unlocking UBE enables my disabled WiFi card, yet network support remains turned off. The window theme also randomly switched to Redmond.

I'm somewhat neutral about UBE auto-mounting USB drives. While I won't mount USB's found on a street, even mounting my own drives gave me conflicting feelings. It's quite reckless from a security perspective but incredibly convenient at the same time.

The Field Trip

There isn't much to say, other than that I'm pleasantly surprised of how well UBE performed throughout the field trip. I was able to take quick notes and type longer posts without a worry about this netbook heating up. At the start of the field trip, the battery was at 96%; after one hour and approximately 20 minutes, the battery was 77% charged. Keeping the tiny eMachines suspended during times when I didn't need it significantly improved its power consumption and remained relatively cool during the entire trip.

TL;DR

After my rocky start with Ubuntu when I first got into Linux, I was vary about Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Things have changed a lot since “Maverick Meerkat” and Canonical started its series of controversial features with the integration of Amazon search results in Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” less than two years after the release of 10.10. With Canonical dropping its support for 32-bit architectures in 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” released seven years after the initial release “Maverick Meerkat”, it was a sign that most Linux distributions either will also turn their backs on 32-bit personal computers entirely or still provide support but pay less attention to it. While the majority of the Linux ecosystem missed the brief netbook boom, Canonical did take the risk and now granted me the opportunity to revive my old eMachines.

Despite the weak responsiveness of Unity, Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 still does its job well and, in case I should need more programs, I can compile some of them myself. Just to test how well this machine would tolerate compiling, I let it compile the latest version of the text-based web browser Links (without SSL support, as either OpenSSL or NSS needs to be build first). Although this was the first time I ever compiled a program from source, it worked flawlessly (however I did fail at understanding OpenSSL and why it compiles and connects successfully but ends up freezing Links).

This also means that my odyssey finally has come to an end. Because UBE already satisfies my use case, CrunchBang won't get tested – at least for the time being. Who knows what I'll come up with for my ancient Hyrican tower once it has served its purpose as a backup machine / compatibility tester for my collection of ancient Windows software, especially now that I'm familiar with DOSBox-X.

Hardware:

eMachines eM250

Motherboard: Acer eM250 V1.25

Processor: Intel Atom N270 @ 1.600 GHz

Display: Intel Mobile 945GSE Express Integrated Graphics

Memory: 1 GB RAM (987.9 MiB)

Storage: 150 GB Seagate ST9160314AS HDD (149.05 GiB)

Network: Qualcomm Atheros AR8132 Fast Ethernet & Broadcom BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY