Trying to rescue a 1GB RAM laptop
from maliciousonion@lemmy.ml to linux@lemmy.ml on 17 Jul 2024 04:54
https://lemmy.ml/post/18078222
from maliciousonion@lemmy.ml to linux@lemmy.ml on 17 Jul 2024 04:54
https://lemmy.ml/post/18078222
I had an Aspire One D270 laptop with a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU and 1 gigabyte of RAM, so I installed Debian with Xfce on it, but even then it’s running way too slow.
Is there anything I can do to make the laptop faster and more responsive given its limited memory?
threaded - newest
could always give antix linux a shot
JWM is my suggestion. It’s a floating window manager (not tiling) that doesn’t require almost any knowledge or key bindings to use and it has all necessary stuff included out of the box afaik. You can also use xdgmenumaker to make the right click/Start menu better.
@maliciousonion personally I'd go with Debian + IceWM on that. Works pretty well.
Try puppy linux ?
It’s a bit on the complicated side but still a good distro.
If you use mechanical hard drive in it, it worth a try to replace it with an SSD. After that, Debian should run much better.
Hopefully it got standard SATA connector.
without any checking of course, I assumed that machine is “new enough” to have some form of SATA in it, but good point
Yeah the machine is 32-bit, so it’s a question worth asking.
You can buy IDE m.2 converter. There are usb to floppy converters, usb drive shows up as floppy drive. You can attach modern peripherals to old computers, this kind of retro world with modern and old parts mixed is funny.
Would it worth, though? I mean, is there a significant difference on IDE between HDD or SSD? With an adapter, SATA speeds on the long run would be bottlenecked by IDE if I’m correct.
Still worth it, for the latency elimination alone. But also I expect a SSD would saturate the IDE connection whereas a HDD rarely would.
Yeah, it’s not quick, there is no noticeable difference in speed. Random read should be much quicker. But you can’t really buy ide hdds anymore and they will die sooner or later, and the price of small m.2 sata ssds are falling.
I can speak from experience that it is worth it. It won’t be a super speed demon, but it will make it somewhat more usable. I’ve done so with my Asus Eee PC 901 netbook which has the two PATA SSDs. Those SSDs are SUPER slow compared to the cheapest mSATA SSD you can find with more than double the space, and all you need is a MiniPCI-to-mSATA adapter (the Eee PC 901’s drive slots are MiniPCI). I documented all about it here: …wordpress.com/…/my-geeeky-experiment-part-3/
I’m running OpenBSD/i386 on mine which isn’t as fast as something like Linux, but it definitely felt faster even with OpenBSD after the hardware upgrade. I also increased the RAM to 2 GB which is the maximum amount supported.
Time flies, where a HDD is barely enough to run a minimal Linux.
I acquired an ewaste laptop with an 8 year old celeron, 4GB of memory and a 500GB HDD. I tossed Linux Mint on there as an experiment to see what would work decently on there. Its not great, but its usable and might become my daughter’s first computer. Running firefox its noticably slow but I can crack open Libre Office or ScummVM and other than the initial load time it’s pretty snappy. I kinda forgot how hard drives give systems that slow-then-fast feeling…
Zram
I have a similar device Intel atom, 1gb RAM. I installed arch and use it as a headless computer (without DE/WM). If I need WM I use sway. Use a minimal browser like Qutebrowser. Although it would also run like shit but better than chrome/firefox.
Try Bodhi Linux - you can burn it to CD/USB or copy it on a Ventoy USB stick to test before installing and it is available for 32 bit systems
Maybe try Openbox instead of XFCE. Can’t promise it’ll add much memory but with 1gb RAM I guess every bit counts?
Edit: just had a quick look around, and it looks like your machine can be upgraded to a whopping 2gb RAM… It’s still not great, but it is a 100% increase in memory.
Edit 2: I’m not actually recommending you buy RAM from memorystock.com, it just turned up at the top of my search results. The page should give you the type and version you’ll need to look for, though.
2 gb memory should make XFCE usable. That’s what my crappy laptop has and XFCE works fine. I use Firefox with a few open tabs and watch YouTube at 720p.
I once swapped a Debian install with XFCE to just running Openbox instead of a full DE and got down to 300Mb or so of memory usage. This was about a decade ago so obviously YMMV but given literally all I did was run Debian with just openbox and no DE, there’s probably additional tuning to be done that can get them to a more usable state
If that’s one of those old 10" netbooks, I had good experiences running dwm and xmonad on mine back in the day (had an Acer and later an MSI Wind U120(?)). Typically ran all my apps maximized, one per desktop. Firefox did okay, but this was around 2010-2012. Mostly stuck with terminal apps and it was more than snappy enough.
Some screenshots from days past…
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/e4b532cb-6a80-43e6-984b-73e6d1417e0a.png">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/81b41305-20d2-4892-9f39-3d8992260208.png">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/9f4d2b98-6059-468c-bebe-47898a412666.png">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/1bcf8091-796c-4c88-b995-da7523ce6169.png">
Ohhh, the MSI Wind. One of my favorite devices, so much value for money. Loved it
Me too! I can’t recall now why I parted with it, but I wish I hadn’t. Would love to see what it could do today.
RAM broke and was soldered in :(
I have a similar but dual core Atom netbook. The thing I did was put an SSD into it, and then installing bare Debian. I chose no graphical system from the installer. From there I installed i3 as the window manager and launched it with an automatic login script checking if I was on TTY1.
That’s all I did, basically keeping the stuff the little thing has to run to an absolute minimum, and a fully fledged desktop environment would have set it on fire.
I have something like that running Haiku. Try it, you’ll be surprised.
Compile your own kernel for those atom processors and they work much better.
It’s not hard, there’s a text interface for it where you just pick what to do from a list.
That will only speed it up slightly at best and at worse it will be slower
I’ve never compiled my kernel so I’m not familiar with what is happening there, but why could that be faster? Is it only installing drivers for present devices, or what is happening?
I can’t remember off the top of my head because it’s been a long while, but there’s some weird option inside the configurator that accounts for one of the things the early atom line doesn’t have that the default kernel expects out of x86 or x64 processors.
Of course, any binary program that was compiled with the expectation of that capacity would also have weird hangs and slowness, but (like I said, a while ago) that didn’t tend to cause a 1.3ghz atom to be slower than a 700mhz pentium m.
Someone suggested antix. I second that. Try it. They got 32 bit version.
You need something like DamnSmallLinux, not Debian. Debian users about 800 MB of RAM with XFce, on a clean boot. It requires a minimum of 2 GB with a modern browser (one tab, 4+ GB with more tabs). DamnSmallLinux uses about 128 MB RAM on a clean boot, and with the Netfront browser about half a gig. Definitely better for such a laptop than any modern distro.
Antix linux would also work great, and DSL is based on it.
Try antix. its requirements are 256mb ram. And it’s actually usable.
It isn’t going to be faster than Debian. I think the issue is the GPU not supporting modern encoding which leads to the CPU doing everything the GPU is suppost to do
You can try something like antiX but it won’t do good as a desktop. I use my netbook as a home server with pi-hole in it.
Slitaz should need only ~60MB of RAM to run. Wireless networking probably won’t work out of the box, tho.
You can also try either MenuetOS or Kolibri, both are super tiny.
Do not run Slitaz as is fully of security problems and vulnerabilities. What’s worse is that there website has security holes on it. There is a page on the bug tracker that runs arbitrary JavaScript and prints out the time as an example. It also has been abandoned and is no longer maintained all that well.
1gb of ram is quiet a bit. I’ve ran Debian Xfce4 on simular hardware it it works with a few tabs. The problem is the modern internet is graphics heavy and the old GPU doesn’t have a lot of power. If you don’t block ads with Ublock origin it will grind to a halt as the video and image rendering will be done by the CPU as the GPU is to old.
OP did say he tried Debian with xfce and it was slow, I don’t see the point in insisting on using that
Because it isn’t going to be faster to use something else else. Unless they added a ton of stuff it shouldn’t use more than a quarter of the ram. Firefox suspends tabs under ram pressure so that shouldn’t be an issue either.
I’ve done work on a old Atom with 1gb of ram. It isn’t fast but it gets the job done. You can’t just make old hardware run fast by changing the desktop
SSD upgrade
And then ZRAM and swap like hell
.
Won’t that kill the SSD on short notice? Or can they make do with it for years?
I mean, worth the tradeoff? Zram would just make the cpu work more. Swap… kill the ssd
But over time. SSDs can handle a lot, like a couple of years?
Won’t be a couple of years if you’re constantly swapping, no.
Not really, if you would spend a lot more on SDD drives instead of getting a modern computer
Do you have numbers? I dont think its that dramatic
I thought it’s either swap or ZRAM - could you use both at the same time?
Yes Fedora uses swap and zram by default. Just compresses the memory in RAM (more memory available) and on disk (less data written, less wear)
Wow, that’s supercool actually! I had no idea…
This will be the single biggest change you can make. Swapping an hdd for a cheap 256gb ssd will make a bigger difference than any DE changes.
First install an SSD if you haven’t already. Next install ublock origin in Firefox ESR and tighten down the security settings to max plus turn off all telemetry, studies and other “features.” Don’t use a Mozilla account as that adds overhead.
It still will be slow but it should be usable with a few tabs. Do not try to do video playback as the old GPU doesn’t support modern video formats so the CPU ends up decoding it all.
Use Dietpi as your main distro, do a minimal install, install sway and then your usual stuff.
t. Got a orange pi zero 3 w/ 1GiB of ram, did exactly as my suggestion implies and everything works as intended.
I have that exact machine in my electronics “graveyard”.
Peppermint OS was my GO-TO for speed and driver support out of the box. You can also stick in a 2GB SODIMM of ram. It will only recognize 1.5GB but still 50% more ram.
AntiX
I am currently running Antix on my Acer Aspire One D255 with mixed results, Falkon to browse the “modern” web, and netsurf for simple websites, can’t play 1080p videos smoothly so I have to first resize them with ffmpeg (it takes a long time but it’s doable), other stuff like libreoffice works flawlessly.
Oh yeah, I completely forgot, that laptops real old, so go ahead and regrease the cpu.
I have two roughly 10 years old laptop that is completely usable, how do I go about regreasing the cpu (M14x r2 & A1502)?
Locate the service manuals or some kind of tear down. Confirm that the process will be within your capability. Order some thermal compound. Disassemble the laptop until you remove the heatsink from the cpu. Clean the old cpu and heatsink with isopropyl until it’s as clean as can possibly be. Apply new thermal compound. Reassemble laptop.
this might be the service manual for the alienware
A1502 could be a lot of laptops, use the emc number or serial to find out which one or just look for the MacBook Pro NN,n number in the about option under the Apple menu. It doesn’t matter which one you have, they’re all really easy to work on and well documented.
Check on youtube there is probably a video on how to open and do it your laptop model
Oooh. So I keep a Dell Mini 10 (1GB RAM, ~1GHz Atom) around with Haiku on it. It’s brilliant! The UI is super snappy even on such an old machine, and I can even run pretty modern software on it. I used it yesterday to work on my website a bit. :)
I didn’t know Haiku had actual hardware support!
It seems like you’ve got plenty of choices already, but how about an OS that’s already been cut down to work on the limited RAM of a Raspberry PI? It bills itself as a good alternative for limited hardware.
www.raspberrypi.com/…/raspberry-pi-desktop/
Maybe try bunsenlabs? It’s uses openbox instead of a de.
I run it on a pentium m laptop and it runs well enough
Pentium m 735, 1 gb of ddr ram
.
either you go the easy route and use a distribution targeted towards low spec systems like damn small linux or you go the difficult route and implement the same measures that they implement onto your debian installation.
last time i was in your situation i ended up doing both and i’m glad i did because my version of the build never worked as well as the custom distro.
Antix linux is a very begginer friendly distro with very light specs
Use an old distro?
I first installed Ubuntu 4 or 5 on a Thinkpad T42 with 512 MB of RAM. I used it until about version 10, when they forced everyone to use left-handed window controls. It all ran about as well as XP did on that machine. Might be unsafe to bring online, nowadays, but if it gets borked do you really care?
You do not necessarily have to use an old distribution. In some ways, a modern one is even more efficient.
The biggest problem is the shift from 32 to 64 bit which makes the same software take 2 - 3 times more RAM.
Next is the desktop environment. KDE is surprisingly light compared to 4 but GNOME is a beast and KDE 3 lighter. KDE is still available as Trinity. GNOME 2 (still not that light ) is available still as MATE. Most of the X11 Window Managers from back in the day or still available and still as fast and light as ever.
A modern 32 distro with a decent DE is more capable than old stuff and almost as performant.
Check out Q4OS 32 bit with Trinity for example.
Looking up the specs of a D270, looks like the memory is upgradable.
It also looks like the Intel Atom N2600 it has (from my reading) is actually a 64-bit processor
I’d probably say you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a bigger DDR3 memory stick for it for dirt cheap or free from an e-wasted notebook
Ultimately it depends if the performance loss you’re finding is memory limited or CPU limited right now, but I would think that giving it 2 or 4GB + giving it 64-bit would go a long way
replace HDD with SSD, number one thing to do if possible.
lxde or lxqt are quite a bit lighter then xfce.
you could try tiny core linux. it really depends what programs you want to run.
On a laptop that old, I highly recommend a 32 bit distro.
Q4OS with Trinity: q4os.org
Antix antixlinux.com
DSL www.damnsmalllinux.org
You could also enable ZRAM If it is not already.