I have a HP Stream 14 netbook ex-Windows 8. It's light, with a nice screen and the audio is OK. I'd really like to carry on using it.
Trying to find a light Linux distro that doesn't hammer the 2Gb RAM (only 1.65Gb usable) or 32Gb storage. All the light distros I have tried have stumbled at install somewhere along the line.
Biggest bugbear is the Broadcom BCM43142 WiFi card that very rarely is detected at install. I can sometimes fix that by installing drivers but often find I cannot access the /lib/firmware/brcm folder to add the files - either because I cannot access via root or cannot find a way to finding or creating the folder.
Mostly, the larger distros run up against the RAM limits and pretty much all the usual lightweight distros run OK with lighter browsers but none will access all the hardware aspects - screen resolutaion etc., even sometimes not allowing the use of UK/GB keyboard or language.
All I need is a distro that can handle web browsing adequately, use the native Broadcom card and boot in a reasonable time. Currently on Mint 20.3 Xfce.
There;s got to be a distro out there somewhere for me.
Any ideas?

XFCE desktop usually does not use much RAM, I would guess that should be fine. What is the available RAM as soon as you boot to desktop?
Something else that is lightweight is antiX.

For the wifi driver check: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/b43

I would look for a older version of slackware or debian. they have old versions online last I knew. problem is security or old bugs if not both. slackware comes with non free firmware by default. debian prefers pure OSS so may have to look around further to find a unofficial non-free firmware.

slackware hasnt changed much command wise and compiling kernel. oldest distro and still around very stable though little slow on updates sometimes. only major change is slackbuilds which makes installing software easier.

Here's an article that might help: https://www.techradar.com/news/best-...t-linux-distro

Of the ones listed, I'd tend to recommend AntiX. MX might also be worth a look.

AntiX or MX Linux should work with Broadcom wifi.

Thanks. The RAM used at boot with htop is about 558Mb. Opening a couple of tabs on Firefox (including this one) gets me to about 1.1Gb. There should be enough room left for things to work, and the OS hardly ever uses swap space, but everything slows down a hell of a lot.

The driver used by Mint is wl (Broadcom-STA) and that sort of works, but the operation is very flakey. Usually it connects at a few Mb speeds within a few feet of the router. Sometimes, if I stop and restart, it will connect at up to about 30Mb, but soon drops back thereafter. Using a StarTech mini 150Mb dongle is much faster (I understand the reasons), but will never connect automatically and it is not always plugged in. It's very frustrating.

I have tried Antix but there are issues. I will try live again and report back.

Thanks for the suggestion. I have tried slakware but it seems just too heavy for this configuration and is slug slow in live format - probably owing to the RAM limitation. Also, to be frank, the idea of the slakbuilds scares the bejasus out of me. I'm not sure I have yet even found a way of "just" installing a package using that method.

I like Debian; it seems a common-sense way to go but on those occasions I have tried to install minimal configurations, I get stuck with not knowing what to include or how to find out what I need in terms of hardware.

Thanks for that, but I think I may have exhausted the list of "best lightweight distros" on the 'net already. I have used antiX and MX but they all have limitations IIRC. Bohdi, for example often gets mentioned, but using that is like watching paint dry and waiting for nothing to happen. As I mentioned in a previous post I shall remind myself what the problems are and get back. I have looked at this: https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/bl...t-lightweight/ and kinda concur. This device is just hardware limited and non-expandable. Storage is not an issue, but RAM definitely is.

If I could find a way to getting my head round installing *just* the bits I need and leaving all the others behind I'd be happy. I don't need the frills, office or graphical stuff - I just want this to function as a comfortable web browser. The desktop is too fixed, the X240 is a pain, the iPad is just that, the phone is too small and this could be just right. I could buy a new one, where's the fun in that?

Maybe I should try the distros again, one by one and then go to the relevant forums for help when I get stuck at installation.

AntiX base, it's what I used to use on my netbooks.

Is that the same as just removing Libre Office from the OS?

modelaero,


https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix...FAQ/index.html

Instead of a heavy common Desktop Environment, antiX uses window managers to control what the end-user can see and do. We hope these FAQs will give you a basic orientation to antiX and its window managers, and provide the means to explore further on your own.

antiX comes in four flavours for 32 and 64 bit boxes. antiX comes as a full distro (<800MB), a base distro (<700MB), a core distro (c310MB) and a net distro (c150MB) all with a kernel that will boot "antique" PII, PIII computers as well as the latest "modern" processors.

Note: The full flavour will not fit on a cd. The base version fits on a cd, but does not include libreoffice.

It's a 64 bit laptop so running installing palemoon 64 bit browser from antiX package manager is no problemo.

AntiX full will run fine and install from from usb port and you won't be looking libraries that are left of base iso.

Your wifi chip was already asked about by anti.

https://www.antixforum.com/forums/to...i-eg-bcm43142/

Run the version 5 kernel instead of 4.9.

Good luck. Notice the wl driver.

You should also have a look at Bodhi Linux. This is the memory used as soon as I boot.

Thanks to those who have replied so far. I am typing this using antiX live full (Oct 21 release) and it is using about 570M RAM with two pages open on Firefox. The wireless connected easily, as I note it has in the past when I have used it, but the audio is not working. I had the same problem yesterday when I tried it and found a way to get round that but I couldn't control it with the volume control keys on the keyboard. I'm sure I could find a way round that using one or more of the various communities if I looked round for long enough, but I'm wary of getting too involved with large elements of terminal based commands, as I find it is easy to make a mistake, get lost and screw the system, thereby having to start over.

The Wireless is connecting reliably on this at approx. 30M, which it simply does not do with Mint Xfce. Also, MXLinux connects easily at the same speeds; something I have seen before but... MX Xfce is very slow and takes quite a bit of RAM and the Fluxbox scrambles some elements of the graphics, for reasons unknown.

I did use Bohdi for a while and I quite like the interface but it is extremely slow on this machine. I don't know the reasons, but it does take more resources than some distros. I can verify that at initial boot it does only take about 296M but I would have to install it to give more details, as neither the wireless card nor the USB ethernet adaptor work in live mode (there is no ethernet port on this device)

All credit to this distro for enabling the touchpad, but it does seem a bit wayward. I 'mostly' works but often goes off at a tangent without warning for some reason, either not responding or doing unexpected things.

I think I have learned that it is possible to configure most distros to utilise all or most of the facilities of whatever machine you are using, given enough time, knowledge and patience but it's starting to get me down a bit. I have been playing with this now for getting on two years and have not found a satisfactory solution yet.

I'll look at the various links and options above again and try to isolate the problems in more detail, so I'll be busy with it for a while. Forgive me if I don't respond quickly.

I think I will have to do several installs of all the appropriate different distros and then make/keep images of them so that I can go back over them as different solutions come to light. It's a pain, but less of a pain than having to keep starting from scratch with a fresh install.

Thanks again.

alsa mixer has hot keys to pick which soundcard to use.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...the-sound-card

Edit: touchpad settings under mouse in antiX control center.