Episode: 2420
Title: HPR2420: Netbooks - Keeping an old friend alive
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2420/hpr2420.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 02:39:56

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This in HPR episode 2,420 entitled, Networks, Keeping an Old Friend Alive, it is hosted
by me and in about 16 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is why networks are not necessarily obsolete and how to keep them performing well.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com, get 15% discount on all shared hosting
with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15, better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hello, this is Beezer again. I decided to talk about netbooks and I'm calling this talk.
It's tempting to say that the netbook is a class of computer is all but dead.
Whether it was killed off by the tablet or the smartphone is open to debate.
But once I hit the market, people quickly stopped buying netbooks.
My Mrs has got an iPad and I borrowed it on a few occasions when I've been travelling and a bit shorter luggage space.
Now I can't deny it's slim size basically convenient from that point of view but I find it frustrating to use.
A touchscreen can't compete with a keyboard and a mouse for productivity if you're trying to do some real work.
Now I'm a touch typist so even with the confined dimensions of a netbook keyboard I can still create documents at a fairly rapid pace.
The on-screen keyboard of a tablet can't be used for touch typing so not only is creating text much slower,
it also damages your eyesight as you inevitably end up maintaining a fixed focus on screen for long periods.
Yes, you can get Bluetooth keyboards for iPads but that's not only a potent symbol of their short cunning.
It also rubs salt into the wound when on top of the excessive price of an iPad you've got to spend more money to make it into a practical business tool.
I had a smartphone for a while but I soon gave that up as a bad job because just having to charge it up every single day was a pain in the backside.
But every time I installed an app I was reminded of the intrusion these devices make into a privacy.
I mean why does an app to help me brush up my gel and vocabulary need access to my photos and my contacts?
When I now use a Nokia feature phone it does everything I need and it regularly goes for 10 or 12 days at a time between charges and even then the battery doesn't run flat.
You do still sometimes see small laptops for sale with screens of about 11.5 inches but the original netbook format with a 10 inch screen is a thing of the past.
Be that as it may I know plenty of people who still have one tucked away in a drawer, kept as a standby machine or like mine used on more a sedative basis.
A few years ago I bought a netbook to use an audio player. Up until then my music collection had been stored mainly on audio CDs but it was beginning to cause problems as their story expanded from 3 shelves to 4, 4 shelves to 5 and beyond.
I looked around for a hard disk-based player that could store all my music and integrated my high-fi system.
The Apple pulled out an iPod with a capacity of 160 gigabytes which should have been plenty but that still had two big problems.
First was the price which at over 300 pounds was more than I was prepared to spend and secondly it was an Apple so that meant whatever it did cost by a definition was not more than it was worth.
The great thing about netbooks was that they generally came with a surprisingly good sound card which could pump out high quality audio through the headphones of it.
Combining that with a decent amount of disk space and a fair price, either solution to my requirement.
I settled on an Acer Aspire 1 netbook for about 180 pounds which came with an AMD chip, 1 gig of RAM and 160 gig hard disk.
I've seen friends buy these sonos systems and struggle to understand why. With the possible exception of being able to use your smartphone as a controller all the functionality of a sonos can be provided by the cheapest laptop for a lot of this money.
My netbook came with Windows 7 Star tradition pre-installed and that was never going to last long so in fact I removed it the day after I bought the netbook.
Unstalled and bent on it and it all seemed to work fine.
Over after a day or so I noticed that even with an audio cable plugged into the headphone socket they'll still sound coming out of netbooks built in speakers.
I fired up the mixed control and explicitly disabled those speakers but it didn't make any difference.
It definitely hadn't been a problem in the shop when the netbook was still running Windows 7 so I knew it wasn't a fault with the hardware.
It had to be an issue with the Linux kernel.
It didn't seem to be any point replacing Ubuntu with another Debian derivative as it might have a similar kernel so I decided to look further afield.
I tried Fedora, Susa and Mandrava but Susa wouldn't install at all on the other two, the Wi-Fi wouldn't work.
The answer turned out to be PC Linux OS which booted up nice and quickly and both the Wi-Fi and the audio were perfectly.
I never had any problems with PC Linux OS but I only ever really considered it to be an interim solution.
For now the reason and prejudice are always instinctively felt happier with distros having their roots in Debian.
It really is a simple and illogical as that.
After a few months the next couple of Ubuntu releases came out, complete with updated kernel so I tried running Zubuntu on the netbook in live mode and everything worked perfectly with the sound.
Somewhat unfairly I know that was the end of PC Linux OS for me.
That was all about five years ago.
Since then I've tried a different distro perhaps every six months or so and the one issue that's been more as consistent is that each seems to be a little slower than the one it replaces.
To be fair most mainstream distros even now can still be run on most netbooks.
UEFI and Secure Boot run like this has been issued on the older hardware which makes the installation very simple.
The problem is that as distros evolve to take advantages of ever faster processors and ever more RAM their optimum host profile is getting further and further away from the typical netbook.
The result is that a netbook that used to run fairly briskly is now probably slow to boot up and its applications similarly open at a more leisurely place than they used to do.
Something I've come to recognize is that there is a difference between the performance you perceive and the actual performance revealed by a stopwatch.
For example if your distro boots to a desktop in 22nd say but it's another 20 before you can actually do anything with it you'll still perceive as being faster than the distro that scrolls boot up takes for 40 seconds and is then ready to go.
When your compute has a slow processor and a lot of RAM the difference in performance between two distros will inevitably be more pronounced than on a more powerful machine.
I've unstandard Ubuntu, Zubuntu, Mint Cinnamon, Mint Marta, Debian, LND and Point Linux on my primary laptop and found little practical difference between them where performance is concerned but on the netbook the difference is often enough to roll one distro out and another distro in.
A big resourcing is of course the desktop environment it eats precious memory in the netbook and it saps the CPU.
Purely as an experiment I spent an interesting afternoon months building a mini-minute StoS without a desktop in Brian's tool.
Starting with a Ubuntu server I added just the components I needed to provide audio and video support and then installed a command line audio player and a command line video player.
Now mock moc is a text mode audio player that to my great surprise provides all the basic functions you'd expect from an equivalent audio player with a GUI and that includes having an equalizer and it supports custom playlists.
It looks like you're back in the early 90s and running DOS but it gets the job done and it fires up near as damage instantly.
There is a video player called Melt and that does pretty much the same thing with video.
I wouldn't choose to run the netbook entirely in text mode obviously but use that way it s relative lack of resources, simply ceases to be an issue.
It s good to know that no matter what happens to Mainstream Linux distros in terms of system requirements as long as the netbook still works there will always be a way of using it as a media player.
As I said it was only an experiment after which I went back to a conventional desktop distro this time it was Linux Mint XFCE.
While it was slow in comparison it did run nicely and the user interface looked good so I had no particular plans to change from that.
However it was not long after I had installed Mint that I came across Tony Hughes' HPR episode about his experience running Raspbian X86.
That inspired me to try it out for myself and from personal experience I already knew that Raspbian runs well in the low resource environment like on the Pi 2 and the Pi 3 so I was intrigued about how well it would run on an Intel processor.
The Raspbian X86 is not just a recompilation of its ARM equivalent but then it is also not just Debian with the pixel desktop added.
Visually pixel certainly looks the same as on a Raspberry Pi but you don't get all the same packages you get on the Pi.
Also the Raspbian config utility which is so very useful on the Pi is a lot less extensive on the X86 and that s a bit of a shame.
I agree with everything Tony said about the shortcomings of the default security model not requiring a password to run things as root on any network enabled device is a bad idea.
What I do understand the goal of keeping things as simple as possible for novice Pi users I think that simplicity should not come at the expense of basic security.
Requiring the user to set an admin password on first boot will actually be beneficial because it introduces the concept of security right from the word go instead of leaving it as an optional extra.
From my first boot of Raspbian 86 I could tell it was the fastest out-of-the-box distribution on run-on-line network for quite some time.
It was very promising to start as well as making a password compulsory for admin activities I created a new admin user profile and deleted the default.
If you continue to use the widely-known default profile which is created on the installation well that's the layer of your security it's been removed straight away to the advantage of an SSH attacker.
One of the performs of the pixel desktop is very welcome breath of fresh air I can't resale its appearance does it any favours it just doesn't look like a professional user in the face even though it works fine.
In some way you couldn't imagine using it to write a thesis on nuclear physics or to manage a corporate takeover but fortunately while you can never turn it into anything as sophisticated as Martell Cinnamon you do have some limited control over colors and fonts and you can reposition the taskbar to the bottom of the screen that's what you prefer.
Well there's only one icon theme you can store others using synaptic package manager but I'm not found any way to make them active using the supplied tools I tried deconf editor but had no effects.
In the end I got round the problem by using a cheat I just renamed the icon folders so that the no human theme was identified as the default pics PIX theme.
That can still improve the appearance of user interface.
Another change I made was to install the car her fire manager to use as an alternative to the default PC man FM.
The car is the excellent fire manager that comes with the Martell desktop.
I'll surprise how few dependencies had to be installed alongside by synaptic to get it running.
The car her was originally based on Nautilus which is the standard known fire manager but Nautilus has since been badly messed about with to extend that I think I'd find it more as unusable.
There's nothing wrong with PC man FM as such but if you have the option of using car instead I think you'd be daft not to.
The final change I made is to install Clementine as the audio player.
The WN repositories on which Raspbian is based do not include a Spotify client so I needed audio player which could connect to my Spotify account in Clementine fits that bill.
I've only encountered one real problem with Raspbian X86 and that involves the HDMI output.
In terms of video it works fine you just plug the cable in and boot up.
The display comes up on your TV or monitor size correctly without having to adjust any settings.
The end trouble is there's no sound.
The mixer gives the option of sending the audio through the HDMI output but it has no effect.
You can still direct the audio to local speakers or to the headphone socket so that provides a viable workaround in my circumstances as my TV can take a separate audio input.
You might not see everybody though but I'm not saying there's no other solution but having found one that works for me I've not bothered to look any further.
In conclusion I would recommend that Raspbian X86 to any netbook user who is finding their currently looks distro but on the slow side.
I think it's entirely possible that even the HDMI audio will work out the box in other machines.
Mine is slightly unusually and having an AMD chip instead of the Intel plus of course not all netbooks even have an HDMI output anyway.
I would highly recommend though that you make those simple configuration changes to ensure that admin actions always require a password and even better don't use a default user profile at all once your initial setup is complete.
A lot of netbooks sitting almost forgotten in drawers or on the back of a cupboard may have fallen by the wayside because they're deemed to be too small to be practical.
We can buy a USB cable for next to nothing to get around the input problems and if you've got an old monitor you can also get around the display side shortcomings.
Regardless of whether your netbook runs Linux or Windows connect the keyboard and monitor and set the power manager so that it carries on working with the lid closed instead of going to hibernation.
Suddenly you have a compact desktop computer.
You only press a power user but it's more than adequate for somebody just wants to send emails on type of few letters.
If you have no use for it yourself your old netbook could get a second life in hands of somebody whose finances perhaps wouldn't stretch the buying a computer at all.
When my netbook inevitably comes the end of its life I've every intention of replacing it with another small format laptop some kind to continue to meet my media player requirements.
I can't imagine using any other kind of device now that a Raspberry Pi 3 would actually make a perfectly adequate media player but would involve just too many peripherals and training cables to create a practical system.
Tablets don't have anything like the necessary storage and a touch interface is just not efficient for selecting dozens or even hundreds of tracks quickly to add to a playlist.
I'll now send a keyboard or a far better option.
Well to end I hope I've convinced at least one person that while netbooks may be outdated they're not necessarily obsolete or redundant.
If you got one but it runs Windows I can well imagine why you probably gave up using it.
However replacing Windows would almost any Linux distro will breathe life back into it and Raspberry and 86 in particular could well be the king to getting a year or two more service out of your old friend possibly to the benefit of somebody in your local community.
This is Beezer in Shropshire, England saying bye for now.
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