The Blog of Bob Rubbens
TL;DR: I never realized how I depend on the internet for almost anything. Also, battery capacity.
There have been some people discussing their experience with retro netbooks on the internet lately (e.g. Jahed's post, Igor's, or Neil's). I vaguely remembered my girlfriend had a similar laptop stored away somewhere. She mostly used it for schoolwork years ago. Inspired by other bloggers describing their experience with netbooks from around 2010, I decided wanted to take it for a spin and see how spoilt I actually am by modern-day hardware. I figured, maybe I can use it as a handy laptop for light coding and browsing tasks in the evenings. After a brief discussion and puppy eyes, I got access. Thanks, H!
The oddx laptop in its full glory.
A note about the laptop's brand name and type: I have been unable to find anything on the internet about this "oddx" brand; neither "oddx" or "x odd" yielded any results. The reason I use "oddx" and not "x odd", as it says on the lid, is that there was an account on the laptop called "oddx". There is also not a model number on the laptop. I did do a hardware scan, see the next section for that. If you have any documentation or references about this model or the company behind it, let me know.
Using this 16 year old laptop was a fun trip down memory lane, not just because of the highschool pictures H had on there, but also because it has been at least 10 years since I last touched a Windows XP machine! Unfortunately I have no screenshots from this process. It was heartwarming to click through the ancient-feeling UI and look at all the cute tiny Windows XP icons. While browsing the laptop's files, I also noticed a strange "3DSP" driver running in the icon tray. I thought that was strange, but as this was quite a strange laptop to begin with, the brand itself being quite unknown and all, I did not give it much thought. Little did I know, it was a portent of what was to come...
The files all backed up, I set out to try and see what would run without any hardware changes.
I figured I'd give Debian a shot first. Not for any particular reason; I'm used to apt and Debian and its derivates have been relatively low maintenance, in my experience. The first time I tried doing a minimal network install, which failed catastrophically as the installer did not pick up the built-in wifi card. Not feeling like grabbing a LAN cable (yet), I proceeded with the install, expecting to just get this system up and running using only the command line. The installation succeeded, but I realized I'm not capable enough to use an extremely minimal system like this, nor do I enjoy it.
For the second try, I came prepared with a LAN cable, so the installer could do a proper full installation. After the installation, while system was technically usable, in practice it was insufficient. Anything beyond the terminal, most importantly, the browser, would cause the system to lag.
The slow system did not prevent me from doing a hardware scan so I could finally get a closer peek at the hardwarde (see here). The results confirmed what I was expecting: this is a minimal laptop, with a 1.60GHz CPU and 2Gb RAM. While we might laugh at this now, at the time it was a very servicable laptop. Indeed, H fondly remembers writing many school reports on it, and that it never once slowed down when she was doing all kinds of schoolwork. Obviously, running a "modern" Linux GUI stack on it must introduce its own inefficiencies, so it's not unexpected that just dumping standard Debian on it doesn't work. The reason for the perceived snappyness of the netbook back then could be that there was is already an SSD in it! Compared to a desktop with a plain HDD, this tiny critter of a laptop must have felt quite responsive at the time.
From an ergonomic usability perspective, the experience actually wasn't too bad! The keyboard is quite tiny, but that actually didn't bother me too much. While typing wasn't as comfortable, quick or precise as it is for me on my full-width work laptop, I'm pretty sure I could become pretty productive with this keyboard given a few evenings of programming. The touch pad was as bad as I had predicted from just a casual glance. To move the mouse, I felt like I had to push harder than was natural on the touch pad, and even then I felt like it did not fully register my movement on the pad. The mouse buttons feel very resistive, and when you press them they make quite a loud clicking noise. I guess it's typical for touch pads from the 00's, but if I were to do anything other than terminal work for more than a few hours on this laptop I would definitely move to an actual table and bring a mouse.
The only problem I actually managed to resolve, was the wifi support.
Wifi took a while to setup. As foreshadowed earlier, the built-in 3DSP network card didn't work with any of the linuxes I tried. After being frustrated with that for a while, on a whim I bought a small wireless adapter: the TP-Link Archer 3TU. I picked this one specifically, despite its larger size, because the packaging had a "supported by Mac" logo on it. I've read before on the internet that getting wifi adapters to work on linux can be difficult, so I figured, if I buy one that works on Mac, that might increase the chances of a driver being in the kernel. I know that's wishful thinking, but it was the best I could do on short notice. Turns out there is a driver for the TP-Link adapter in the kernel, but only in the newest kernel versions. I got the adapter to work at some point by compiling a shady driver from github myself. Here, I only mean shady in the sense that I didn't understand it, nor properly inspected the source - it actually looks quite reputable and thorough. You can find it here. As I've never done anything with the kernel before, the process felt weird and finnicky, but at some point I managed to ping my home country's major news site!
Even though I got the wifi to work once, I set out to find a linux installation that would give me a working wifi adapter out of the box. Long story short, I settled on Debian 12 with the 6.10 kernel from backports. The only hiccup I had to resolve here is that I actually had to enable the wifi adapter with the built-in Fn+F3 keyboard shortcut. That was not the hardware integration I expected, but nice nonetheless!
At this point, I had already used the system for a few hours. These are the biggest blockers for me actually using the system.
My regular workflow, especially when learning new technologies, involve constantly looking things up on the internet. Not having a snappy browser at my disposal is something I can learn to live without, but not something I enjoy, nor am looking for. Using a terminal browser like lynx or elinks would solve the performance issue, and using these browsers was actually quite fun. However, for day-to-day development use, for me it is not a realistic option.
Support for 32bit software development is rapidly dwindling. I have no citation for this, just my own experience. For example, I was looking for a lightweight browser, as a compromise between Lynx and Firefox. I tried installing the Falkon browser on openSUSE Tumbleweed, but the package manager wouldn't let me. There's a big chance that I was misusing the package manager, but by now I believe it is because there is simply no 32bit build available. Similarly, I tried running qutebrowser from source, but some packages did not seem to be available for 32bit (in my case, the python3-Pyqt6-webengine package).
In addition, I tried building some of my own hobby projects, which are mostly JVM-based. These also didn't compile out-of-the-box because the tools I use there (metals, coursier, mill) do not support 32bit (in the sense that the default install commands from the respective websites just crashed for random reasons).
I'm not complaining; most of these services are provided for free, so they are completely within their right to drop support for a platform that few people use. Obviously, I could just compile the dependencies for these tools myself, and they probably would work fine on 32bit. Unfortunately, the experience indicates that most things that magically "just work" on my day-to-day laptop seem to be tricky on this tiny stone age laptop.
The battery life on this machine is not great. I think I once left it running without a charger, back when it only had the minimal Debian install on it, and it was on for about 90 minutes before turning off automatically. But when doing some "serious" work on it (e.g. browsing the web with one tab, downloading and building code), I don't think the battery lasted longer than 45 minutes. I wasn't expecting this laptop to be usable for a whole evening without grabbing the charger, but having to plug it in after only 40 minutes is also not ideal.
I put in a recent (maybe 4 years old?) SSD to see if that would help with the general user experience. It helped with the available disk space, obviously, but besides that it didn't change much. I'm guessing the SSD that was in there was already fast enough to make the CPU the main bottleneck. I looked around briefly if there were any larger RAM modules available, but I couldn't find anything bigger than 2GB. Since I highly doubted that those unmarked RAM modules on ebay were actually faster than the stick that was already in the netbook, I stopped there.
This was a pretty fun experiment from a hobby perspective. The netbook is still in the living room, close to the couch, and I plan on grabbing it a few more times to try it out in terminal only mode and do some light programming, as the experience wasn't too bad. But in the long run, the limited speed & battery capacity makes it hard to use this mini machine in a more structured manner.