Mastodawn

The Last Psion | Alex Oct 12, 2023

This potato of a laptop fell into my hands recently - an Acer Aspire One D257, running an Atom N455 @ 1.66 GHz with 1GB DDR3 RAM.

I've just popped an SSD in it. I'm thinking about using it only as a MAME machine to run the #Psion SIBO emulation, just for demos.

So... Maybe Debian? Possibly even running 32 bit (it is a 64 bit CPU, but that lack of RAM worries me). A lightweight DE or WM.

I could run Arch, but I really want this to Just Work™.

Any suggestions?

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Kroc Camen Oct 12, 2023

@thelastpsion The CPUs in these things are utterly overwhelmed by modern software, the cache is Pentium-3 tiny. HaikuOS would be a long shot but it would be fast! Besides this, some lightweight distro will get you a barely usable system but you definitely need RAM. Depending on the chipset you will likely be limited to 2GB and _possibly_ 4GB

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The Last Psion | Alex

@kroc Just been checking this out - limited to 2GB. I've just bought a 2GB Crucial stick off eBay for £2.99, so that should help a bit.

My initial thought was Debian or Arch with Openbox. I was also wondering about FreeBSD, because I've never tried it.

I hadn't thought of Haiku! I haven't played with BeOS since they released BeOS 5 Personal Edition 5 back in the 90s. If I can get MAME on it, then I'm definitely going to give that a go.