What distro would you recommend for a 32-bit old Acer One laptop?

yum13241, 5 months ago

Arch Linux 32.

KISSmyOS, 5 months ago

The only distro I could get to boot on my old Acer One was MX Linux.
It had the rare combination of 32bit UEFI support (cause the Acer supports neither 64bit UEFI nor legacy BIOS) and the necessary firmware out of the box.

But after upgrading it to the current release, it broke again. And then I threw the netbook away cause I have better things to do with my time.

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

Oh shit, what newest release did you upgrade to? I think I have MX21 in my Acer one

KISSmyOS, 5 months ago

23, the one that is based on Debian Bookworm.
21.3 worked fine.

KISSmyOS, 5 months ago

If you don’t want to reinstall just cause you forgot your password:
linuxconfig.org/recover-reset-forgotten-linux-roo…

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

Thanks, that's actually a very clear tutorial. Definitely saving it

kugmo, 5 months ago

Whatever distro you install, make sure you enable zram, it makes old computers with low ram much more usable, and an out of memory killer too.

piexil, 5 months ago

Ooms are much less necessary with MGLRU if they keep to a new kernel

kugmo, 5 months ago

I’d still use an oom killer even on 6.1 which is the kernel Debian uses, mglru got improvements in following kernels like you said.

dan, 5 months ago

The Linux kernel already has OOM killing… Do you mean something like Facebook’s oomd where you can more easily control it from userspace?

kugmo, 5 months ago

yeah, from what i remember the kernel’s oom killer isn’t that fast and external ones work better

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

Thanks! Great advice 👍

Lemmchen, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

I’d probably try a minimal Debian installation with the Openbox WM.

Link, in case you’re having trouble locating the .iso: …debian.org/…/debian-12.2.0-i386-netinst.iso

Atemu, 5 months ago

See if you can get the memory upgraded. DDR3 SO-DIMMs should be dirt cheap.

I’d also get a cheap SSD aswell, especially if this is for a child who might not be very careful with the machine.

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

Hmmm yeah I hadn't thought about upgrading the laptop, that's a big idea, and indeed it should be super cheap

LeFantome, 5 months ago

I use super old hardware as well. An SSD will blow your mind.

Krtek, 5 months ago

If you don’t have to use it but want to keep it functional, why just not reinstall MX again? You know that and how it works

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

Because it does give me a functional piece of software to grab YouTube videos without actually opening YouTube, but it cannot really run Firefox with uBlock, which basically means web browsing is impossible

jvrava9, 5 months ago

AntiX or Arch 32 bit

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

Yeah I'm going with AntiX. Used it a long time ago and assumed it had merged with Mepis to do MX, but thanks to this thread I find out it's still available

Qkall, 5 months ago

Puppy Linux is very active on the 32bit land.

timicin, 5 months ago

either that or damn small linux

Molten_Moron, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

There’s also TinyCore, made by the lead developer of Damn Small Linux after it stopped being developed.

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

Thanks! I'll check it out

neige, 5 months ago

MX, anything else is a farce

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

I've been using MX since it was Mepis. I love seeing it said well recommended in this thread. For the old laptop I'll go with AntiX

olafurp, 5 months ago

I’d recommend Alpine and running it headless. Realistically you’d need 4GB+ of ram to run a modern desktop session so that’s not ideal. However running Alpine headless will leave you with 800M to run programs.

You can still run a GUI desktop on it but I’d recommend having a nice sized swap partition/file to make up for it. It’ll be slow as soon as you hit the 1GB memory and starting swapping out.

lemmyvore, 5 months ago

It’s not the desktop that needs 4 GB, it’s large apps like modern browser or office. The desktop will run fine on 1 GB. May want to look into Midori and Abiword as alternatives.

olafurp, 5 months ago

Absolutely correct, Alpine can run a desktop environment with 500 megs.

ik5pvx, 5 months ago

You might be able to reset the root password by booting to single user, or using a rescue usb.

That said, you could take the chance to try one of the BSDs.

ani, 5 months ago

Lubuntu

coolmojo, 5 months ago

Something like Sugar or Doudoulinux would perhaps be more suitable for your daughter.

Doudoulinux has not been updated since ages , but it will run very well on any old laptop.

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check those out

joyofpeanuts, 5 months ago

Debian with the choice of LXDE as window manager. Debian offers high configurability to remove any heavy component.

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

That's a good point, I could jus try debian and remove the unnecessary stuff. I want my daughter to use this laptop so it needs some video codecs and hopefully some educational games.

Some commenters said you need a minimum of 2GB memory to run Debian. What do you make of that?

joyofpeanuts, 5 months ago

See this: www.debian.org/releases/…/ch03s04.en.htmlMinimum 1Gb, preferably 2 for a desktop.

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

Ah, good to know. I wonder how is it possible then for Debain-based distros (MX) to run well on this notebook

ipsirc, 5 months ago

Don’t want to hurt your daughter. And don’t want to hurt the Linux community by making a girl hate Linux when she’s a child.

ininewcrow, 5 months ago

Hannah Montana Linux?

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

LOL

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

Why would she hate Linux?

ipsirc, 5 months ago

Because it’s SLOOOOOOOOOW.

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

This laptop wouldn't even run on windows so I'm not sure what you're suggesting

Frederic, 5 months ago

yeah MX21 32bits is what I would install, or AntiX.

Can’t you boot on a USB key and reset the root password on your HD partition?

Doll_Tow_Jet-ski, 5 months ago

AntiX! Of course. I thought Antix had merged with Mepis to create MX. Didn't know they were still around. probably the best choice since it still seems to be based on Debian Stable

Frederic, 5 months ago

AntiX is awesome on old HW, everything works, just don’t load a big website in the browser or it crawls :)