A friend gave me a good old Asus Eee 900 with 16 gb hdd (but with RAM upgraded from 1gb to 2gb) with a broken and cluttered Xandros install.

I'm looking for for a somewhat lightweight and minimalistic distribution which might work reasonable good on a Eee 900 2014. Or is this simply impossible? Is it just too old?

I've been using debian and debian-like distros for the most part but I'm very open to trying out other distinct branches.

The idea is to use it for surfing, writing, and hanging out on IRC. Nothing too fancy in other words.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

you didn't say what the CPU is ..
- the hdd would be nicer if it was about 40Gb,

but try anti-X
antix.mepis.org

mainly, because of the size of the hdd.

1 members found this post helpful.

Oh, sorry about that. It's a Celeron M ULV Processor 900MHz.

Thanks, I will check out anti-X

antiX should run well, I use Slackware on my EeePC 701. Actually anything should run well on that machine, if you don't use the heavy environments (KDE, Gnome, Unity) and rather go for something lightweight (XFCE, LXDE/LXQt, Enlightenment or some of the other WMs).

The Celeron M may not have pae: run
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep pae
to see if it does. If it doesn't, then AntiX and Bodhi will still work. Here are my reviews:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/review...page/15/sort/7
http://www.linuxquestions.org/review...page/15/sort/7

I run standard Debian with Xfce on my 900. Works fine, no noticeable lags, no problems. You may want to think about using an SD card or external USB drive for holding /home or even the rootfs, since the internal SSD isn't that big, or that fast. I've been running from a USB HDD, and while it's slower to boot, it runs fine once it finishes booting.

I'm writing this on an Eee PC 901 with Lubuntu 13.04 installed. Mine has an Atom processor and 2 GB RAM. IDK how the Atom compares to the Celeron. I just have it installed on the internal drives, nothing in the card reader, and it runs fine (although a bit slow).

From power on to my homepage in Firefox is under a minute (estimated, I haven't actually timed it). FF tends to freeze every now and then (especially on opening a new tab), but give it 10 seconds and it will be back. LibreOffice works well, from what I've used of it. I haven't done much, just editing a doocument or two, but it runs fast enough for me.

The Lubuntu software center is slow, but useable. Just expect to wait a few seconds after almost every click.

I keep a CPU temperature icon in the menu bar along the bottom because I hear the fan spin up a lot. It doesn't seem to like flash at all, I've pushed it up to 65C just by atching videos on Youtube. Right now, I've been browsing this forum for about 20 minutes, and the temp is at 48C.

Random application launch times (after browsing this forum for 20 mins):
LibreOffice Writer: <7 seconds
Audacious: <3 seconds
Audacity: <5 seconds
Lubuuntu Software Center: <7 seconds

I hope this helps you make your decision. Good luck!

I ran a eee900 for a long while before switching to M&A Atom Netbook which is a toughbook version of a eeepc 900.

If really interested.

http://antix.freeforums.org/antix-11...hed-t3104.html

There is a later one though that borrows from mine for 12

http://antix.freeforums.org/antix-12...tep-t3868.html

The latest final is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/anti...al/antiX-13.2/

go for the

I sold my 2 eeepcs (900 & 701SD) to pay for the M&A so I don't have them anymore. Mine ran good on the 32bit Full isos. 13.2 is now way better than when I ran it back in the 8.0 days. More features.
Pick Debian Stable repos when the choice is offered. (or testing or unstable/sid, up to you)

For everything else

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFW...KlXW5uE9opXukQ

See. That is the kinda support we give to a new AntiX user.

Debian Wheezy worked "out of the box". I did upgrade the ssd to 64G. I have since replaced mine with a Vivobook x202e & installed Ubermix (http://www.ubermix.org/) for my daughter to play with.

Regards,
Stefan

Pretty much anything will work yuo would probably need about 3 gigs of swap, use the rest of the hdd for your root partition. and use an ssd card for a storage partition. Ive seen 32 gig cards on sale for unde 25$. If you DL alot of movies or big files Maybe Go with a 64 or 128. You really don't need a socalled lightweight distro for that machine. If you like Slackware for example try Vector or Zenwalk Not trully lightweight but the install is smaller than a Slackware install. It will give you a little more room to DL large files and simply move them to your storage partition.

Might want to sdteer clear of some of the more bloated distros, like Ubuntu- but some of the lighter distros, like Crunchbang [it's like a minimalist Debian, with the Openbox window-manager instead of a desktop environment) or the already-mentioned AntiX (also Debian based, with a choice of several different window-managers instead of a resource-hogging DE) will FLY on the machine.

Hey all! Thank you so much for all your wonderful tips. I played around a little and found that many distros proved to work out really well, to my surprise. Anyway, it ended up staying with Bodhi Linux. It works really well, looks good and I kind of like it for the lulz also.

Thanks again. Now I'm going to try to get antiX to work on my acer aspire 1413lc (it doesn't even have wifi )