I have this 11 year old oddly resistant Pentium laptop and I’m thinking of turning it into a reading/light-programming tool. It used to run great back in the day but modern software has gotten so bloated that it can barely run GNOME with Firefox, so I was thinking of sticking to command line only. Is there anything specific I should look into?
In specific I mainly only want to be able to download and read mdbooks in the terminal, probably using archlinux32 as the OS (or maybe LFS?). Captcha abuse and all that javascript already ruined browsing with Lynx so I have little hopes of actually browsing the web. I also intend to get a new battery as it only lasts 1-2 hours nowadays. Any other 32bit/tty-only customisation guides are also welcome.
You could run Void on it… and a few other niche distros, but Void is the most mainstream one that still supports x86. Plus, xbps-src holds almost everything else that is not present in the official repos, so, you could just compile from source using the template.
Forget about the battery, it’s not worth it. Use it till it dies completely, then remove it and use it on the charger.
Void seems cool.
But battery might be important since a lot of laptops will not start if the batttery is missing or has undervoltage. General advise would therefore be to not discharge the battery to a bare mininum but to keep it always at least 20-30% charged. Especially when Laptop is not used for longer time.
I’ll be away from both stable electricity and stable internet so I can’t just ditch a battery.
Are you a horse?
Didn’t realise I walked into comedy central.
Doesn’t really matter, those chargers can take in from about 90V to about 250, 260V. Forget what the sticker says about 110~230, they’re designed for unstable voltage operation (not actually designed for that, but they don’t wanna make different ones for EU and UK/US voltages coz it costs more, plus people bitch about not being able to use them abroad, so they just make the same ones and ship with different plugs). Trust me, they can handle voltage swings pretty darn good. They’re SMPS power supplies, they’re designed to output the same voltage in a very wide range of input voltages.
If you really think that a battery will help (it might help… in some cases… depending on gow it’s built), just leave the battery on even if it’s dead. It might work as voltage dumper in some cases, but as I said, it depends on the design.
By “stable” I mean that for the majority of the time I will not have any electricity or internet. My use case explicitly requires battery and offline software.