But the power supply for that eeePC is only 40W, so that means it'll draw at most 40W under heavy load - including the display and hard drive etc. One tenth of 40W is only 4W. It's not really a reasonable ask to find something useful that uses less than 4W.

Although you CAN find machines now that are magnitudes faster than said eeePC that use somewhat less power. Almost all the BayTrail & Braswell Celeron & Pentiums in laptops/tablets are 6W cpu's. And the performance will destroy the older EEEpc. Even moreso with the newest Apollo Lake Celeron/Pentiums. Still 6W, but actually quite quick (I have a Chuwi Lapbook with the N3450 Apollo Lake), such as that Chuwi is easily faster than my first generation dual core hyperthreaded core i5 that's in my tablet.

It might be hard in an x86 platform. But the Raspberry Pi B is a 5V at 1A or a 5W machine. Lots of other things now with lower power draw like the RPi Zero which supposedly draws < 1W. Granted that once you add a display, wifi, and other things it adds up. But it really depends on what you consider useful and those power hungry things are not always on. A sound server, a web server, a router, all have their uses. A mips ci-20 is 5V @ 0.8A, or 4W under load, a 1.2GHz dual core with 1GB ram. All of which are relatively old boards by now. Wifi on that one, but ofc no display on that power spec.

Many thanks for your overwhelming response, to everybody. Wow!

Yes, it was initially a rant, and I softened the title of the post. I am frustrated, I love this little Netbook. I'm beyond that now, and rationally looking into solutions. It might take some time and effort, but it's worth it to me.

I'm in the process of trying to install Mint Mate from USB and get an error message. I think I'll make a separate post for this problem, but I'll mention it here first. I get the following message which hangs on boot from USB: "SYSLINUX 3.63 Debian-2008-07-15 EBIOS Copyright (C) 1994-2008 H. Peter Anvin" with a prompt "boot:" (linuxmint-18-mate-32bit.iso)

Based on my reading, Mint Mate seems to be a good candidate, I did find some posts about this problem, which might be related to Asus machines, but failed to find a solution.

Any takers?

Meanwhile, I will read and explore all of everybody's ideas and report back ASAP (Debian Xfce also seems to be a good candidate, and I'll look into other solutions mentioned above).

Many thanks again,

RM

Sorry, I re-read my post and realised it was bit harsh, glad you took it as intended.
I used to run Debian XFCE on my EEEPC before it gave up the ghost but I'm not convinced it would still work that well with modern web pages and the like, I tend to recommend the Debian non-free installer so that the wireless may actually work during install.

It depends on how you define works. You can slim down your OS footprint a bit. By using systemctl or service to stop services not used by the average user. I tend towards minimum installs which doesn't install some of those things, so I don't have to stop them after boot. It only goes so far though. Sometimes it's just better to get new gear. Plus it's soo cheap these days. For $99 you can get 4 core 64 bit arm based laptop with 2GB ram. For $200-ish a dual core x86 with 2GB ram. For $400-ish a quad core x86 with 8GB ram. Most of which have HDMI out if the 1366x768 trend irks you. And that's "new" pricing, you can do far better going "used".

https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=3707

Many thanks,

One thing I failed to mention is that the Asus 1005PE Netbook is really built like a tank. Solid!

I'm a cyclotourist and have travelled on rough terrain all accross Europe with it in a bag on my back rack, really bumpy terrain, sometimes trekking routes... and after about 10,000km, it still works like a charm.

I'm very skeptical about new hardware as well as new OS and software. So many things that come out these days are so much cheaper (or less intuitive and practical for OS and software). I bought two laptops since, and they haven't survived similar treatment, far from it.

Yes, I could buy something new, but nothing proves that it will be as solid and resistant as the Netbook I'm writing you from at this very instant.

Again, many thanks to all for your replies and suggestions.

I've posted two other, more specific posts regarding specific problems (browser and Mint Mate installation).

RM

If you'd like to try something with enterprise grade toughness, use Motion Computing slates are both tough and reasonably cheap (on eBay). I just picked up a J3500 semi-rugged for $60, and everything worked out-of-box with Debian 9. Even bluetooth, which does NOT work on the older Motion Computing LE1700 due to its weird proprietary way of leaving the bluetooth device unpowered by default.

It's very tough and inspires confidence. These things are designed to be used outdoors in harsh environments, including rain. CPU performance and RAM blows away any old netbook. Just make sure to NOT get one with the 160GB hard drive - that's the size of the spinning hard drive. You get better performance from one with an SSD (most common size is 128GB).

i own & use an acer aspire one zg5, which is from the same "era" as the asus eeepc, but slightly better - faster (single core though) processor, real hard drive.
i also recently own a pinebook; if you are considering getting one, please consider that the final price will be about twice as much as the advertised 99$. you can read my (currently) one and only blog entry.

i tried ubuntu mate and found it rather disappointing.
it seems mate is using normal gtk3 apps more and more, and even its core is not very efficient.
i'm sure ubuntu 10.04 was much lighter than that.

my old netbook runs archlinux + i3, the pinebook runs armbian with xfce (ubuntu based).

if i had to choose between mate & xfce, i'd choose xfce.

Hi all,

Many thanks for all of your suggestions. Yeah, I think xfce would be better than mate. I've used mate on my 14.04 Ubuntu and was disappointed too.

I've opted for Lubuntu (to give it a try in any case), but am having trouble installing.

Any input would be appreciated: info here.

Many thanks,

RM

really, another *buntu?
ubuntu likes to phase out support fopr old hardware.
it has changed a lot since the 10.04 days, and not necessarily to the better.
my recommendation: away from *buntu. maybe AntiX.

Of course, you could really employ some 'sideways' thinking on this, and leave the mainstream crowd behind. I hesitate to suggest it, but you could do much worse than to give Puppy Linux a try. It's very lightweight, yet some of the newest versions are still 'buntu-based, as far as the repos are concerned.

Might not be to your liking, however, since it doesn't use Synaptic and/or apt-get, and the terminal 'vocabulary' is not what you'd be used to at all. The fact that one of our forum members has produced a Puppy respin specially designed to maximize the performance of these old netbooks wouldn't have any bearing on the matter, either.

Nah, forget I said anything..!

Agreed. It's why I switched away from Ubuntu to Puppy. Canonical had arbitrarily decided to drop support for the ATI Radeon Xpress-series graphics chips; I was getting freeze-ups all the time. Switched to Puppy, and it was like a switch had been thrown; the problems simply disappeared.

Mark Shuttleworth really fancies himself as the Bill Gates of the Linux world.....so Ubuntu is constantly being geared towards the very newest of everything. The classic Linux ethos of keeping old hardware useful doesn't even figure in his thinking any more. Mind you, to be fair, this is probably in line with our throwaway society, and manufacturers factoring planned obsolescence into everything they build now. Like you buy something new today, and in two years time, as far as everyone's concerned, it's only fit for scrap. I'm no 'green warrior', but it seems frankly criminal to keep clogging up what limited landfill capacity there is, due, simply, to our obsession with having the newest of everything all the time.

(*shrug*)


Mike.

well you said it now.
i'm wondering: where can i find this specialized respin (and who might that forum member be)?

Hi, ondoho.

The Puppy forum member in question goes by the handle of 8Geee.....and the respin I'm talking about can be found at this thread:-

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=102099

Hope that's of some use.


Mike.

You might like to try AntiX - http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

(I use it on netbooks as well as Vuu-Do Linux - https://sourceforge.net/projects/vuu-do/ )