Anyone know of anything fitting an Eeepc?
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Antix,Debian ,arch i386 project
i wouldn’t recommend debian since they’ve dropped 32 bit support in trixie, their latest release. the previous release, bookworm, still supports 32 bits archs, but it eol’s less than a year from now
This is not true. (Edit: nevermind, I was wrong)
They’re dropping support for i586 and below. 32-bit systems with i686+ processors will still run fine.
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.html#reduced-support-for-i386
From trixie, i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems
[…]
Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware.
Not all 32-bit systems are i386. For example, my 32-bit Debian thinkpad runs Trixie just fine. Because it’s i686 which is still supported.
So again, Debian 13 isn’t dropping 32-bit support. Just i586 support and below.
Not all 32-bit systems are i386
but the debian i386 architecture means all 32 bit x86 processors. there’s no “i686” build of debian
there are no i586 or i686 kernel or iso available, you can look for them. i386 packages only exist for compatibility reasons, so you can run 32 bit applications on amd64 machines. please read the release notes
I was wrong. Thank you. And I don’t have Trixie on the 32-bit Thinkpad, it was my other laptop.
but the debian i386 architecture means all 32 bit x86 processors.
That was very confusing to me. I’m sure they have their reasons, but calling it something like x86 would’ve been more clear to me.
The original x86 platform. Now requires “686” class CPU. Unsupported in trixie and newer except in chroots on amd64 hosts.
I’m sure they have their reasons
maybe compatibility reasons. i guess they used to support i386 back in the day and didn’t want to break the couple of systems that were installed on bo and have been upgrading ever since
I’ve had good luck with Antix on very old machines.
antiX
That said this machine will not be able to cope with the www of 2025.
My eepc is also 32 bit with 2gb of RAM. I did Debian 12 with LXDE from the net installer and it works really well.
Since I doubt the latest and greatest drivers interest you, I suggest debian. Might as well profit from extreme stability and reliability
Debian has dropped support for 32 bit in Debian 13.
Use debian 12 then, again, its not like you need the latest and gratest
Debian Security Support ends in 9 months and the LTS’s supported platforms haven’t been announced. It could very well be that in 9 months the i386 version of Debian 12 stops getting security updates. https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
Another issue others are not addressing is the memory limitations of 32bit software. I am facing it now with a large database that is stuck in a 32 bit world. You may have issues finding 32 bit builds of software as well.
MX runs fine, but applications such as browsers are very slow because of the old CPU 😐
slackware, netbsd, openbsd
edit: i forgot tinycore, you gotta try that too
+1 for NetBSD it’s such a great OS for ressource limited platforms. Rough edges by today standards but it worth a try on OP’s PC.
Edit : would you please post something like neofetch screenshot when your eeepc is up and running ? :)
Not a screenshot since I havent set up any internet communication except package installing yet, but a bad photo is manageble. Now I just have to figure out how to make a specific user that automatically boots into Abiword on login!
OpenSUSE has a 32-bit build.
Running modern web browsers is no fun.
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I loved my Eee PC so much.
I’ve been watching and hoping for a modern ARM equivalent, but haven’t seen anything quite right so far.
I’m not familiar with Eee PCs but I’m assuming you’d want something lightweight. Q4OS has a 32-bit version available.
Debian. Just Debian. No drama.
Not Debian 13. https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.html#reduced-support-for-i386
Also note that the Debian team uses i386 to mean what we think of by 32 bit x86, not just CPUs from the very old i386 generation. https://wiki.debian.org/i386
Depending on the age of the EEE, you might run into problems because the old low end CPU doesn’t support instruction set extensions that are assumed to be present by distros nowadays. I think it was SSE2…?
