Re: Installing Debian on an old Asus EEE PC
Am Freitag, 5. Januar 2024, 17:48:39 CET schrieb Eric S Fraga:
Hi Eric,
the EEEPC was my best friend for many years, although it is rather slow at
boot.
However, once it is booted up, work can be done well. Mostly I used it for
network analysis at my customers and of course office applications.
Speed is not much important for these things, it is not much annoying, if
libreoffice is starting in 30 seconds or 1 and a half minutes.
Most important: It can run all debian things (and more), but note, the EEEPC
is 32-bit, so you need the 32-bit version of debian.
Also, very nice, you can create a multiboot sd card, and stuck it into the
netbook, so you can boot from it several usefull livesystems (I am using XBOOT
for this, but it is also working with YUMI or some others.
For speeding up I used an old SSD drive with Windows_7 on it and Debian on the
second partition. For this, first I cloned Windows 7 to the new harddrive using
clonezilla, then used gparted to get free space on the new SSD, and on this I
installed Debian/stable 32-bit.
Everything is working like a charme, and the wireless card is Atheros· so you
can easily get the wifi card into monitor mode, if required.
Some EEPC got a modem for GSM onboard, mine got one. It is a little
problematic, to get into GSM-internet, there are not many easy dialer apps for
it. Feel free, to ask me for the actual one, I forgot, as my actual EEEPC got
none (so I am using a GSM-Router for this).
Oh, yes, I strongly recommend to increase RAM, 1GB is a little bit few, so I
put a 2GB RAM into it. It is DDR2, and I do not know of any single-4GB-bank
available which is 4GB. Debian (better say: the kernel) can use more than 3GB
of RAM with pae-extension.
What I like most of the EEPC: It is small, can run long time and got all the
nifty tools and apps I need for daily work. Negative thing is only, that it is
rather slow.
But: If you do not need all modern kernels and tools, you can try some fast
small linux version, especially made for very old devices, for example
damnsmalllinux or similar. I never tried many, but I got damnsmallinux running
on a 486er notebook with 1GHz CPU and 48MB RAM running as fast as Windows XP
on a 2GHz CPU with 2GB RAM. I admit, this was a long time ago, but you can
see, linux is often much much faster than Windows, not to say, always.
Something more? Fell free to ask.
Best regards
Hans
> Hello,
>
> anybody here have any experience installing a recent(-ish) version of
> Debian on an Asus EEE PC? This is a small notebook sized laptop with
> Celeron cpu and little space & memory. I've just found one in one of my
> boxes and thought I'd see if I can make use of it. It's currently
> running with a 2.x kernel!
>
> I have found some bits and bobs on the Interweb but I thought I'd ask
> here in case somebody in this group/list has direct experience.
>
> Thank you,
> eric
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