Comment by stasiu
21 hours ago
This brings back memories. I loved my Asus Eee PC 1215p. Bought it with my own money. It was the computer I had when I was moving out of my parental home when I was 20 y/o. When I moved out I had Ubuntu installed on it, but in my student room I realised I had issues with connecting to the internet somehow. Went back to my moms and installed back Windows 7, with the Windows 98 look-and-feel-setting which was a built in option, great user experience. The last Windows machine I even used, but it was amazing. I brought it with me on my hitch hiking adventures through Europe, was using it to DJ using my personal iTunes library in a Polish hippie/hacker/eco village I was staying at. Eventually I stupidly broke the keyboard my cleaning it with a wet towel when it was on, I still feel bad about that really. What a machine, I absolutely loved it!
Ahh, I started my freelance career on a Portege R100 running Arch back in the day. The amount of times I missed meetings because of X11 failing to run or wpa_supplicant shitting the bed...
I used my eee PC for my final year project in college. How I didn't get rsi on that keyboard I'll never know.
We moved house recently and I found it in a box when I was unpacking. Maybe I should find a use for it
I too had it and remember it fondly, it got me through my studies. Very portable machine. I eventually swapped it for a thinkpad which I loved even more. Now I’m with a MacBook Air for the time being, but I think I’ll get another thinkpad when the time comes
After this Eee PC I bought a 2014 MacBook Pro, again amazing machine. Used it through out my CS studies and beyond. After that I had some different machines from my employers but my personal laptop is a ThinkPad t480s, nice machine for Linux.
I miss the form factor of the old netbooks. The 2gb swappable to generally up to 4gb ram was really never great, though was fine with linux as long as you set your swap partition up correctly, though I wouldn't be expecting much in the way of running things like virtualbox or any modern IDE. The 32bit support only was fine then, not now (and with only 2-4gb ram, you didn't want 64bit anyway).
Perfectly adequate for most web dev, scripting, blogging, chatting, network stuff, remote systems administration, etc.
The old netbooks took handling less carefully much more well than anything now other than probably an Apple laptop (I mean, if it fell, odds are it wouldn't break as easily; the ones with hard drives, maybe not as well, but it took more than once; talking the screen and keyboard).
I imagine this is why you liked it. Easy to backpack with.
They were also great for running out for coffee and working without schlepping a full-sized laptop.
I mean the ones with hard drives, not the ones with teeny tiny ssd's. Hard to do much on those, and slower.
Is crunchbang still around?
No, the project leader (corenomial?) packed it in. BunsenLabs is one follow on project and the other is CrunchBang++. Alas both I think are 64 bit only in recent versions because they are based on Debian, which from Trixie (v13 on) is 64 bit only for installation.
I'd look at antiX for reviving a netbook if limited to 32 bit.
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Would you mind sharing few words about the village you mentioned? I am from Poland and am really curious what that village was :)
The place is called Atelier Wolimierz, but it was technically located in the village of Pobiedna, Lower Silesia. Next to the old Wolimierz train station. I was there in 2014. They converted a small airplane hanger in a “earth ship”. The place was pretty wild though at the time, very anarchy vibes, but it was an amazing time. I learned some Polish there and later back home (The Netherlands) I met my Polish wife with this limited Polish knowledge. Have been to Poland many many times ever since! I would actually love to move there with my wife and our daughter.