OpenSuSE 12.1 on an EeePC

The January 2012 Linux Format magazine comes with two distros to try, Fedora 16 and OpenSuse 12.1.

I had one of the original Asus Eeepc 701 machines, upgraded to 1G of memory, lying about so I thought I would try it out with both the disks.

First I tried Fedora 16, a distro I have already installed on other machines. It booted from an external DVD drive ok but then I soon ran into a problem as the 800x480 pixel screen on the Eeepc 701 was just not big enough to handle the installation GUI - I just could not see the buttons I was supposed to be pressing.

Moving on...

I am a long time user of SuSE and was in fact one of their first UK resellers back in the mid 1990s. I have more used RedHat (because of the commercial predominance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Ubuntu. I was interested to see how well OpenSUSE was now doing, given that SuSE is no longer part of Novell with the too cosy relationship with Microsoft.

The OpenSUSE install process coped just fine with the 800x480 screen on the ageing Eeepc. The original 4GB SSD which may have seemed generous back in 2007 is now too small to do anything sensible with. Luckily decent sized SD cards are now 'cheap as chips' so I did my install with the root and swap partitions on the original SSD and /usr and /home on a 16GB SD card.

The internal disk is about twice as fast as the SD card slot which is in turn about twice as fast as USB2.0 memory sticks which is the option for even more storage.

The original Eeepc came out before the Intel Atom chip. It is only a 600 MHz Celeron at its heart so is a bit too weedy for playing Youtube videos. However as a general purpose computer it is fine. This was the original netbook remember, it broke the rule that small notebooks had to be really, really expensive (or had to come loaded up with Windows you did not want). There have been better netbooks over the years but you should be able to pick up one of the original EeePCs for next to nothing.

I just thought that people would like to know that a bang up to date 2012 Linux distro works just fine on one of them.

I have also been making some use over the past few days of an even older computer. An IBM Thinkpad T23 running Linux Mint. Although it is only a 1GHz PIII chip it is a nice size for just doing a bit of net browsing in the living room.

The biggest drawback with that machine is that it only has 512MB of memory. For most things this
is no problem but I have found that after a while web browsers can get very large and make the poor thing start to swap.

Guess I will have to do some experimenting on being very frugal with how much information the browser is permitted to cache. On a machine with limited resources too much caching can be a disadvantage, especially if the Internet is so much faster than it would have been when that generation of computer was developed. We have to adapt to changing environments.

The point of this piece?

By choosing your software carefully and having some sympathy for the age of the technology it is still possible to make good use of computer gear that other people stuck in the Windows mindset would just consider 'junk'. This gives you a big advantage. Even a slow computer can be an active part of the Internet and draw from the huge shared store of knowledge there.